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Wasn't there a time when people were hacking shaders to do compute tasks and read the results back instead of displaying to the frame buffer?
by gosub100 3y ago
Wasn't there a time when people were hacking shaders to do compute tasks and read the results back instead of displaying to the frame buffer?
- p_l 3y agoYes, multiple such attempts, including complete languages. Very thin hardware support as different GPUs varied very much on what could be done. GeForce 8 introduced CUDA because graphics pipeline similarly evolved into position where instead of forcing the use of dedicated cores for specific tasks (vector and fragment shaders) due to simple economies of chip making, the Shader Model 4 introducing yet another stage justified making unified shader cores... which could be just as easily used for other tasks.