Summary
In this chapter, we have built the foundations to support compute shaders in our renderer. We started by introducing timeline semaphores and how they can be used to replace multiple semaphores and fences. We have shown how to wait for a timeline semaphore on the CPU and how a timeline semaphore can be used as part of a queue submission, either for it to be signaled or to be waited on.
Next, we demonstrated how to use the newly introduced timeline semaphore to synchronize execution across the graphics and compute queue.
In the last section, we showed an example of how to approach porting code written for the CPU to the GPU. We first explained some of the benefits of running computations on the GPU. Next, we gave an overview of the execution model for compute shaders and the configuration of local and global workgroup sizes. Finally, we gave a concrete example of a compute shader for cloth simulation and highlighted the main differences with the same code written for the...
