Show HN: Particle Simulation with OpenGL compute shader – 8M particles | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Particle Simulation with OpenGL compute shader – 8M particles

github.com

29 pointsEllipticCurve21 comments

Nice! It's a bit unfortunate that OSX doesn't support OpenGL 4.3 which is needed for this project. It currently only supports OpenGl 4.1. I'm currently toying around with a similiar project where I would have enjoyed to try out compute shaders.

I think, there is a possibility to not use the core-OpenGL but kind of upgrade to the legacy-version.

But I don't know much about that...

Turns out, there is not. No way to get over OpenGL 4.1 on OSX, sorry...

From what I've read, you can get pretty good performance on an iPad Pro. Here's 8M pixels:

http://flexmonkey.blogspot.com/2015/11/a-first-look-at-metal...

The author provides the source. Portable to the Mac?

https://github.com/FlexMonkey/ParticleLab

It's an XCode project: I'm pretty sure it works on Mac. However the code uses Metal, which does not have a C/C++ API. I'll wait for Vulkan to be available on Mac.

If you like it, I will record and post a video of it this evening.

Please do this.

Yes, please!

It would be much appreciated.

There you go :)

https://vimeo.com/151682787

All right, here is a small video of the simulation:

https://vimeo.com/151682787

But after all this recording, converting and uploading, the quality is a bit down... If you like it and have the necessary hardware, I would recommend to just run it yourself. Looks a lot better :)

"In the future, we are committed to bringing it to other platforms, starting with Linux..."

Nice to see a change of heart.

It kind of is Linux ;)

What are some cool snippets of code in this repo? I realize A) that's a loaded question and B) it's all very cool. Just curious if any readers have come across any "Whoa that's cool" parts of the codebase.

I won't know, if you find some^^

I consider myself as decent (but not genius) programmer and you might find some cool code snippets, but probably not in this project ;)

For me this was more about the endresult and getting compute shader to work. Never considered publishing it really...

a video would be cool. nobody is going to bother to get the code and build it, especially in the state its in.

i'm not really sure what this proves beyond the power of the hardware. there are no clever tricks here that i can see beyond 'keeping it simple' but even then... its not so simple as it could be either.

Yes, you are right, it is more like a proof of concept for myself. And as it seems, there are people (similar thread on Reddit), for whom it might help.

Just wanted to share, as there were not too many working projects out there with compute shaders. And it would have helped me :)

ok, that makes some sense. it can be hard to find resources if you are looking for tutorials, examples or guides rather than specifications... not just for this but in general.

the trick imo is to learn not to require those things... which you seem to have managed. but you are right that its a lot easier not to have to work stuff out from the basics. :)

How long before a nodejs based on chakraCore ?

Already exists: https://github.com/Microsoft/node

How long till the 2nd one exist?

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