How could I read information off the graphics card after processing?

Question

Supposing, for example, that I had a 10x10 "cloth" mesh, with each square being two triangles. Now, if I wanted to animate this, I could do the spring calculations on the CPU. Each vertex would have its own "spring" data and would, hopefully, bounce like whatever type of "cloth" it was supposed to represent.

However, that would involve a minimum of about 380? spring calculations per frame. Happily, the per-vertex calculations are "embarrassingly parallel" - Had I one CPU per vertex, each vertex could be run on a single CPU. GPUs, therefore, are theoretically an excellent choice for running such calculations on.

Except (and this is using DirectX/SlimDX) - I have no idea/am not sure how I would/should:

1) Send all this vertex data to the graphics card (yes, I know how to render stuff and have even written my own per-pixel and texture-blending global lighting effect file; however, it is necessary for each vertex to be able to access the position data of at least three other vertices). I suppose I could stick the relevant vertex positions and number of vertex positions in TextureCoords, but there may be a different, standard solution.

2) Read all the vertex data afterwards, so I can update the mesh in memory. Otherwise, each update will act on the exact same data to the exact same result, rather like adding 2 + 3 = 5, 2 + 3 = 5, 2 + 3 = 5 when you want is 2 + 3 = 5 - 2 = 3 + 1.5 = 4.5.

And it may be that I'm looking in the wrong direction to do this.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You could use the approach you have described to pack the data into textures and write special HLSL shaders to compute spring forces and then update vertex positions. That approach is totally valid but can be troublesome when you try to debug problems because you are using texture pixels in an unconventional way (you can draw the texture and maybe write some code to watch the values in a given pixel). It is probably easier in the long run to use something like CUDA, DirectCompute, or OpenCL. CUDA allows you to "bind" the DirectX vertex-buffer for access in CUDA. Then in a CUDA kernel you can use the positions to calculate forces and then write new positions to the vertex-buffer (in parallel on the GPU) before you render the updated positions. There is a cloth demo that uses DirectCompute in the DirectX 10/11 DirectX SDK.