One of the best talks at Siggraph last year was on Bungie's particle system Destiny 2 (slides are here: http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2017/index.html

One of the best talks at Siggraph last year was on Bungie's particle system Destiny 2 (slides are here: http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2017/index.html http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2017/index.html). The talk was an elegant breakdown of how they (1) created a CPU interpreter for a domain specific language describing particle parameters, (2) ported it to the GPU (even running an interpreter on the GPU for parts of the production game!), and (3) how they converted it into a compiler for the obvious performance wins. Apparently running bytecode interpreters on the GPU is not uncommon: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/ https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/