OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 4.3, Eighth Edition

Overview

The graphics processor is an immensely powerful device capable of performing trillions of calculations each second. Over the years, it has been developed to crunch the huge amount of math operations required to render real-time graphics. However, it is possible to use the computational power of the processor for tasks that are not considered graphics, or that don’t fit neatly into the relatively fixed graphical pipeline. To enable this type of use, OpenGL includes a special shader stage called the compute shader. The compute shader can be considered a special, single-stage pipeline that has no fixed input or output. Instead, all automatic input is through a handful of built-in variables. If additional input is needed, those fixed-function ...