OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook - Third Edition

Introduction

Compute shaders were introduced into OpenGL with version 4.3. A compute shader is a shader stage that can be used for arbitrary computation. It provides the ability to leverage the GPU and its inherent parallelism for general computing tasks that might have previously been implemented in serial on the CPU. The compute shader is most useful for tasks that are not directly related to rendering, such as physical simulation.

Although APIs such as OpenCL and CUDA are already available for general purpose computation on the GPU, they are completely separate from OpenGL. Compute shaders are integrated directly within OpenGL, and therefore are more suitable for general computing tasks that are more closely related to graphics rendering. ...