As a graphics programmer in the games industry, it's always exciting to me when people discover how much fun all this stuff is
As a graphics programmer in the games industry, it's always exciting to me when people discover how much fun all this stuff is
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.