Compute Shaders: Optimize your engine using compute / Lou Kramer, AMD

Lou Kramer explains how compute shaders differ from vertex and pixel shaders and how to use them to optimize game engines.

This talk will give an in-depth introduction to compute shaders – how do they differ from vertex and pixel shaders from a programming and from a hardware perspective? What are the typical use cases for compute shaders, what are their advantages and disadvantages – how can you make use of them for your game engine to improve the overall performance? Learn how to write optimal compute shader code which is aware of the structure of GPUs and what functionality the hardware exposes. After the explanation of the basic concepts, we will walk through a practical example which uses a compute shader to perform downsampling, comparing it with an equivalent pixel shader solution.