Offloading to HLSL/GPU without displaying?
- by George R
As far as I know, certain mathematical functions like FFTs and perlin noise, etc. can be much faster when done on the GPU as a pixel shader. My question is, if I wanted to exploit this to calculate results and stream to bitmaps, could I do it without needing to actually display it in Silverlight or something?
More specifically, I was thinking of using this for large terrain generation involving lots of perlin and other noises, and post-processing like high passes and deriving normals from heightmaps, etc, etc.