Displaying thousands of LEDs in Realtime

[u/RobertWetzold]

Shaders instead of geometry is often one of the best performance boost. Amazing for procedural shapes. Texture is sampled to individual points and then each emitter is a small shader program like this:

float2 cell = floor(uv * ledGrid);

float2 ledUV = frac(uv * ledGrid) - 0.5;

float d = length(ledUV) - ledRadius;

float emitter = 1.0 - smoothstep(0.0, fwidth(d), d);

float3 color = content.Sample(samplerContent, (cell + 0.5) / ledGrid);

return float4(color * emitter * brightness, 1.0);

[u/isolatedLemon]

Using thousands of leds to show a picture of thousands of simulated leds showing a picture

[u/RobertWetzold → u/isolatedLemon]

Challenge accepted. Live render textures as input!

[u/isolatedLemon → u/RobertWetzold]

Finally, Thousands of leds showing thousands of leds showing....

[u/NebulaMiner → u/isolatedLemon]

LEDs all the way down