Chapter almost done; I totally got caught up in graphics stuff. · 11:26pm Mar 14th, 2016
I don't want to go too into detail about what I'm working on, but yeah. Cool computer graphics stuff. The long and short of it is that compute shaders are awesome black magic. To explain it in layman terms: your GPU is like a 1000+ core processor that can only efficiently perform small, specific operations. What that means for programming is that you can launch 1000+ processes to happen simultaneously.
You might have heard of multithreading. That's typically on a 2, 4, or 8 core cpu. Compute shaders are a more recent introduction to directX/openGL which let you perform arbitrary computation on 1000+ cores.
GPU's are absolute beasts. Jump to about 30 seconds if it's being slow.
Anyway, nerdgasms aside, I'm more or less finished a new chapter for A Darkened Land and I'll be resuming work on the main story. Currently I'm at 3 chapters into the next arc, but in all honesty I took something of a break from writing for about a month, month-and-a-half this semester. I got really wrapped up in graphics programming and research. In fact one of my final projects involves creating a derivative technique based off 3 different publications and writing a public paper about it.
The past two weeks I've been solidly back in action, and this next side story is the product of that. Also this next side story is probably going to be 5k+ words, so hopefully that's something decent to sink your teeth into. Speaking of sinking teeth into things, I think the break was what I needed. Now that I've indulged myself a bit on other things, I'm gearing up to do a bunch of writing again.
Obviously not as much as when I took a year off after high school to write; I can't compete with my unemployed, non-student self, but I'm back to writing a page or two almost every day now. Also I'm itching for a writerly rant and have just such a subject I want to tackle, so expect a return of "An Unpopular Opinion" later today.
May I also recommend for public consumption (since we're talking GPUs):
more info? i have done some work in that area, if you are interested.
[youtube=3yc8px-w6qk]
It doesn't really work like that, though. The different cores of a CPU can do unrelated tasks while accessing the same memory. Every core of a GPU is either performing the exact same machine instruction every other core is, or doing nothing at all. They're only good for "perform this operation on every element of this array" and useless for any task that can't be reduced to this.
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True, and I know that, but I was trying to keep things simple and succinct.
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What I'm working on is not actually raytracing related. I just wanted a video that showed off compute shaders doing something cool.
Mine is more a very specialized kind of vector field/physics thing.
I wish I could fuss with shaders.
Have to wait until I get a computer with a video card that uses them.