Compute Shader

Compute Shader (Compute shader) is a technical term that is extremely important in rendering and optimizing game graphics (technical art). An explanation of a program that is completely independent of the graphics drawing path and utilizes the GPU's thousands of massively parallel cores to process massive mathematical calculations such as physical calculations, large number of particle position calculations, and crowd simulations at lightning speed.

Real-world analogy: Instead of one super genius mathematician (CPU) working tirelessly to solve tens of thousands of math homework assignments, he gathers ``10,000 normal students (thousands of GPU cores)'' in an elementary school gymnasium and has them solve the problems one at a time at the same time in massively parallel speed.

Compute shader is a system that monopolizes the GPU's thousands of huge brains (parallel cores) and performs calculations at extremely high speed, not for the purpose of drawing (coloring the screen), but simply for solving ``huge mathematical calculations (physical calculations and position simulations)''. Since the calculation results are directly passed to the next drawing stage without leaving the GPU's memory, there is no slow data communication between the CPU and GPU (PCIe bottleneck), and tens of thousands of objects, more than 10,000 times more than usual, can be dynamically moved at the same time. This is the overwhelming heart that moves behind the "millions of particles" of VFX Graph.

Detailed mechanism and operating principle

Computational processing is completely ported from C# to "Compute Shader (computation-specific GPU code), directly thrown into a GPU with thousands of parallel cores for instant parallel computation, and the results are directly applied to mesh drawing.