What is a vertex shader?
A vertex shader is a procedure for processing a single vertex. It is defined using a simple assembly-like language that is assembled by the D3DX utility library into a token stream that Direct3D accepts. The vertex shader takes as input a single vertex and a set of constant values; it outputs a vertex position (in clip-space) and optionally a set of colors and texture coordinates, which are used in rasterization. Notice that when you have a custom vertex shader, the vertex components no longer have any semantics applied to them by Direct3D and vertices are simply arbitrary data that is interpreted by the vertex shader you create.
