Say I have render targets 0 through N and RT 0 happens to have in its fourth component an alpha channel specified by a material or mask or something. Is it possible to have the hardware compositor blend render targets 1 through N using the alpha of the first render target?

When rendering two overlapping co-planar surfaces, a common issue is "z-fighting", where the renderer can't decide which of the two surfaces is closer to the camera, giving visual artifacts in the area of overlap. The standard solution to this is to give the surfaces a slight offset when designi...

This is a question about using several GPUs. As such it sounds on topic. However, a comment shows that the parallel use of GPUs is not the main problem: A good answer is predicated on knowing how the displays will be connected to the available GPUs (getting 9+ display outputs on a single comp...

When writing non-trivial shaders (just as when writing any other piece of non-trivial code), people make mistakes.[citation needed] However, I can't just debug it like any other code - you can't just attach gdb or the Visual Studio debugger after all. You can't even do printf debugging, because t...

I'm looking to use my GPU for non-graphical calculations (artificial life simulations) but ideally I would like to leave this running for weeks at a time, 24 hours a day. Is there anything I should take into account before trying this? Is a GPU subject to overheating or shortening of its lifespa...

I often find myself copy-pasting code between several shaders. This includes both certain computations or data shared between all shaders in a single pipeline, and common computations which all of my vertex shaders need (or any other stage). Of course, that's horrible practice: if I need to chan...

Some SE sites (notably SO) don't want questions about best practices as they can lead to opinionated answers. I think that is definitely a risk, but there's certainly also great value in such questions if they do get useful answers. As an example, I have posted such a question earlier today: Sha...