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Compute shaders solve essentially all these issues, and more. The graphics pipeline consists of programmable and semi-fixed components and it is quite often us
by pyalot2 13y ago
Compute shaders solve essentially all these issues, and more.
The graphics pipeline consists of programmable and semi-fixed components and it is quite often useful to interact with it. For that purpose compute shaders introduce compute kernels, atomic counters, atomic locks, sharable buffers and some hookups to the pipeline stages.
This is functionality gleaned from Cuda, but repackaged in a more or less portable way. Of course compute shader kernels aren't as flexible as either Cuda or OpenCL programs. However OpenCL is by now quite far behind "the state of the art".
- lmeyerov 13y agoAh, interesting. OpenCL/WebCL solve this problem, so I think the question is portability. Will compute shaders be landing in most WebGL implementations? WebGL seems generally limited to OpenGL ES, so I had only explored BrookGPU-style alternatives. Targeting CUDA/OpenCL/WebCL was so that we can rely upon intermediate GPGPU compilers. Our DSL compiler outputs a bunch of for-loops, which traditional compilers love to optimize (the JIT for JS, LLVM for OpenCL, etc.). If we targeted a low-level language such as nvidia's PTX, I suspect we'd still want something like LLVM inbetween. Is there a good preprocessor for compute shaders?
- pyalot2 13y agoAt least in the OpenGL world, compute shaders use more or less the same syntax as other kinds of shaders (GLSL). It's true that WebGL does not have compute shaders (and neither does OpenGL ES), yet. However OpenGL ES roughly tracks OpenGL's development with OpenGL ES 2.0 == OGL 2.0, OpenGL ES 3.0 == OGL 3.0, in each case with a bunch of features stripped but with the essential advances in place. OpenGL ES 4.0 which should come about in the next 2-3 years is very likely to include compute shaders.