Implementing cloth simulation using async compute
In this section, we are going to implement a simple cloth simulation on the GPU as an example use case of a compute workload. We start by explaining why running some tasks on the GPU might be beneficial. Next, we provide an overview of compute shaders. Finally, we show how to port code from the CPU to the GPU and highlight some of the differences between the two platforms.
Benefits of using compute shaders
In the past, physics simulations mainly ran on the CPU. GPUs only had enough compute capacity for graphics work, and most stages in the pipeline were implemented by dedicated hardware blocks that could only perform one task. As GPUs evolved, pipeline stages moved to generic compute blocks that could perform different tasks.
This increase both in flexibility and compute capacity has allowed engine developers to move some workloads on the GPU. Aside from raw performance, running some computations on the GPU avoids expensive...
