Nicolas Cannasse, the creator of the Haxe programming language and founder of Shiro Games, just released a new tool – Pico GPU. He described it’s release with the following tweet:
Sometimes the easiest way to learn something is to strip away all the complexity and focus on the basics. That is exactly what Pico GPU does, by providing a VERY limited development environment to create fragment and vertex shaders on a virtualize GPU (as well as raw audio as well). How limited? Well:
Pico GPU specification are:
- 640×480 resolution at 60FPS, with 24 bit depth and 8 bit stencil
- 300KB gpu memory to load your textures, buffers, code and shaders
- 4 channels Mono 32 bit sound synthesis at 48 KHz (using GPU shaders)
- complete support for vertex & fragment buffers
- support blending, culling, depth, stencil, color mask, clipping
- support render targets and instancing
- maths matrix, vector, quaternion support
- save & load as a 640×480 PNG screenshot that contains all your data
- share your apps with the community!
Key Links
The Pico GPU project is open source (although it does not appear to have a license attached currently) and is written predictably enough using the Haxe programming language. You can learn more about Pico GPU and see it in action in the video below.