Basic Introduction and Implementation of Compute Shader in Unity

Compute Shader is a relatively popular technology today, such as in the previous “Moonlight Blade Mobile Game” and the recently popular “Naraka: Bladepoint”. Unity’s official introduction to Compute Shader is as follows: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-ComputeShader.html. The Compute Shader runs on the GPU like other Shaders, but it is independent of the rendering pipeline. We can use it to implement a large number of parallel GPU algorithms to speed up our games.

In Unity, we right-click in the Project to create a Compute Shader file:

The generated files belong to a kind of Asset file, and all have .compute as the file suffix. Let’s take a look at the default content inside:

#pragma kernel CSMain
RWTexture2D<float4> Result;
[numthreads(8,8,1)]
void CSMain (uint3 id : SV_DispatchThreadID)
{
    Result[id.xy] = float4(id.x & id.y, (id.x & 15)/15.0, (id.y & 15)/15.0, 0.0);
}

The main purpose of this article is to enable new learners to understand the meaning of these lines of code, and only after learning the basics can they read more awesome code.

https://blog.en.uwa4d.com/2022/10/25/basic-introduction-and-implementation-of-compute-shader-in-unity/