Behind the scenes

No new Polygon release this week. The work was all behind the scenes.

Compute shaders

One of the goals of Polygon v2 is to make compute shaders first-class citizens. If you’re not familiar with compute shaders, they let you run code on the GPU instead of the CPU. And when you can build them with nodes, you get much faster geometry processing. It won’t suit every operation, but anything that can run in parallel is a good fit.

A large part of this ongoing development is to make those nodes easier to use and better integrated with the rest of Polygon, like geometries and textures. The reaction-diffusion effect from last week now runs as a compute shader, with examples ready for the next version. There should be more concrete examples by then.

Even further behind the scenes: CAD

I’m making progress on the custom CAD kernel. Some days it feels like I’m making great strides. Other days it feels like it still needs a lot of work before it’s presentable. I’m wondering if there is a way to ship it as a beta. Time will tell.

As always, tell me what you build, and what is missing. Reply to this email, or say hello in the Discord, Bluesky or Twitter.

Gui