The bad thing about going from OpenGL and vert/frag shaders to Compute shader is that we kind of have a lot of knowledge on OpenGL that we might not be able to use. Of course, graphics programming is going to be sort of similar but it still feels like we have done a lot of work that we just scrapped to try to move over to compute shading. (Of course, all the interaction programming as well as the theories behind our graphics programming is still intact - which is a lot by itself, but it feels a bit annoying to have to get rid of so much work anyways).
Nevertheless, we did some reading and looked at some examples and used some pieces of code that we could manipulate into our own project. Ultimately, we learned a lot from this step - as we did when setting up the first version of the OpenGL system.
For example, we learned that modern GPU:s process data points in batches of 32, which means that our particle system should be a multiple of 32 for the highest efficiency.
We also decided to move away from the idea of using textures to store the particle data. This is not because it would be impossible to do with the compute shader. It is rather because we could simply use a buffer and achieve a very high particle count anyways.
We decided that the 3.2 million simultaneous particles (at 60FPS) we achieved on the first try by using ComputeBuffer basically was enough and we decided to, at least for the moment, not explore the possibility of using textures as storage. At this point we have already worked so many hours on this project so it is really time to leave the small optimizations and try to achieve something that works.
The next post will show you the particle system and the not-so-well-working hand interaction.
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