Shader Systems Are Ridiculously Powerful If You're Clever Enough

LinkedIn posts are DoA here, and I can understand why.

But this is worth reading:

Quoting:

Laurie Kirk

Shader systems are ridiculously powerful if you’re clever enough.

Most people use them to create visual effects. You know what’s cooler?

Running Linux.

Inside an emulated RISC-V CPU. Inside a pixel shader. Inside of VRChat...

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VRChat allows users to embed custom fragment shaders within worlds.

Of course, you don’t just get to run arbitrary C code wherever you want; that would be an insane security risk.

But, you do have textures. Textures that can hold state.

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By abusing the heck out of shader logic, you can do some funny things.

To run linux in a shader, you first need a (simulated) CPU.

Of course, someone took it to the logical extreme; and emulated RISC-V logic in HLSL.

~64MiB of “Ram” stored as a texture.

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Tick between frames fast enough, and you get a (somewhat useable) CPU.

About ~250 kilohertz on a 2080Ti.

Not much, but enough to run Linux!

What I love most is that you can visually “see” the system state at any point just by viewing the texture itself.

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From:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/laurie-kirk_shader-systems-are-ridiculously-powerful-ugcPost-7393761568427016192-08-x