Shader systems are ridiculously powerful if you're clever enough LinkedIn posts are DoA here, and I can understand why. But this is worth reading: Quoting: Laurie Kirk Shader systems are ridiculously powerful if you’re clever enough. Most people use them to create visual effects. You know what’s cooler? Running Linux. Inside an emulated RISC-V CPU. Inside a pixel shader. Inside of VRChat... — VRChat allows users to embed custom fragment shaders within worlds. Of course, you don’t just get to run arbitrary C code wherever you want; that would be an insane security risk. But, you do have textures. Textures that can hold state. — By abusing the heck out of shader logic, you can do some funny things. To run linux in a shader, you first need a (simulated) CPU. Of course, someone took it to the logical extreme; and emulated RISC-V logic in HLSL. ~64MiB of “Ram” stored as a texture. — Tick between frames fast enough, and you get a (somewhat useable) CPU. About ~250 kilohertz on a 2080Ti. Not much, but enough to run Linux! What I love most is that you can visually “see” the system state at any point just by viewing the texture itself. ======== From: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/laurie-kirk_shader-systems-are-ridiculously-powerful-ugcPost-7393761568427016192-08-x |