most notably, gpus are insanely fast at parallel floating point computations - in layman’s terms it just do maths real fast like.
![opengl 4.3 best ways to deal with vertex data opengl 4.3 best ways to deal with vertex data](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/street-fighter-v_20180503212357.jpg)
I’m glad you asked! compute shaders allow us to, outside of the regular rendering pipeline, run arbitrary shader code on the gpu so we can exploit the cool properties of it’s architecture.
OPENGL 4.3 BEST WAYS TO DEAL WITH VERTEX DATA HOW TO
so against my better judgement, i set out to learn how to harness their power. it’s not even something that was strictly necessary but compute shaders were always this really cool arcane art that i wanted to have control over.
![opengl 4.3 best ways to deal with vertex data opengl 4.3 best ways to deal with vertex data](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/2018052615272800-e7260330e4b7d47c63ff99ba9689d77c1.jpg)
Maybe it was hubris that forced me to do this, but i decided that as a part of one of my final units in my undergrad uni course i would write compute shaders. i really cannot recommend it enough if you want to get comfortable with not only writing applications with opengl, but also the concepts you’ll often come up against in 3d graphics. the bulk of what i know comes from the excellent series of written guides over at learnopengl. however, i am comfortable enough in my knowledge to at least make things work (most of the time, anyway). frankly, i still don’t even completely get what a vertex array object even is. i’ve got the most cursory knowledge of opengl 3.3 (nevermind 4.3) if you can even call it that.
![opengl 4.3 best ways to deal with vertex data opengl 4.3 best ways to deal with vertex data](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/android-adoption-chart-may-2019.png)
Now i’ll be the first to admit: i’m not great at graphics programming. If you’re like me and hate intro guff then feel free to skip to the section “let’s get started then” to cut the shit and learn how to make your gpu go brr