OpenGL – Build high performance graphics

Creating a fractal texture using the compute shader

We'll wrap up this chapter with an example that makes use of the compute shader to produce an image of a fractal. We'll use the classic Mandelbrot set.

The Mandelbrot set is based on iterations of the following complex polynomial:

Where z and c are a complex numbers. Starting with the value z = 0 + 0i, we apply the iteration repeatedly until a maximum number of iterations is reached or the value of z exceeds a specified maximum. For a given value of c, if the iteration remains stable (z doesn't increase above the maximum) the point is inside the Mandelbrot set and we color the position corresponding ...