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

Physical Simulation

The first example is a simple particle simulator. In this example, we use a compute shader to update the positions of close to a million particles in real time. Although the physical simulation is very simple, it produces visually interesting results and demonstrates the relative ease with which this type of algorithm can be implemented in a compute shader.

The algorithm implemented in this example is as follows. Two large buffers are allocated, one which stores the current velocity of each particle and a second which stores the current position. At each time step, a compute shader executes and each invocation processes a single particle. The current velocity and position are read from their respective buffers. A new velocity ...