Implementing a particle simulation with the compute shader

In this recipe, we'll implement a simple particle simulation. We'll have the compute shader handle the physics computations and update the particle positions directly. Then, we'll just render the particles as points. Without the compute shader, we'd need to update the positions on the CPU by stepping through the array of particles and updating each position in a serial fashion, or by making use of transform feedback, as shown in the Creating a particle system using transform feedback recipe in Chapter 9, Using Noise in Shaders.

Doing such animations with vertex shaders is sometimes counterintuitive and requires some additional work (such as transform feedback setup). With the compute shader, we can do the particle physics in parallel on the GPU, and customize our compute space to get the most "bang for the buck" out of our GPU.

The following image shows our particle simulation running with one million particles. Each particle is rendered...