Panda3D and Compute Shaders

General Discussion
1

Hello,

Is it possible to use “Compute Shaders” in Panda?
A compute shader is a shader that runs on the GPU without necessarily refering to geometry (i.e. It works on dynamic texture generation ).

Chrys

2

As far as I know, it is perfectly possible to use OpenCL independently of Panda3D. Panda also supports libraries such as PhysX or Bullet that can take advantage of OpenCL to do computations on the graphics hardware.

3

Just for the record:

  • Our Bullet module uses only the “core” Bullet physics engine. Hardware acceleration is an add-on for the Bullet physics engine, and all add-ons have been excluded because of user requests.

  • Out PhysX 2.8 module can make use of the graphics card, but here the shaders are built-in within the PhysX engine. Users can not provide their own shaders/programs.

4

I just checked in compute shader support for OpenGL (GLSL only). Proof-of-concept test case is available here. Still very experimental and buggy.

EDIT: for anyone finding this thread via Google, information about using compute shaders in Panda3D is available here:
https://docs.panda3d.org/1.10/python/programming/shaders/compute-shaders