https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/18dry49/2023_day_8_part_2glsl_brute_forced_in_under_a/

  • ICEMAN [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I don't know shit about stuff l7ke this, but it's interesting. What does this mean?

      • coloredgrayscale@programming.dev
        ·
        1 year ago

        One way to get the data is to render to a (hidden) surface/canvas. It's just bytes to the computer, so just dump the result data in the display buffer. Then you take a "screenshot" and interpret the RGBA values as data.

        • graphicsguy@programming.dev
          ·
          1 year ago

          Graphics Programmer here.

          More likely you would just write data to a buffer (basically an array of whatever element type you want) rather than a render target and then read it back to the cpu. Dx, vulkan, etc. all have APIs to upload / download to / from the GPU quite easily, and CUDA makes it even easier, so a simple compute shader or CUDA kernel that writes to a buffer would make the most sense for general purpose computation like an advent of code problem.