[mcbits]

Yes, irrelevant, because the article is simply describing how to combine a sphere+bumps+noise to look like an explosion.

Your project seems to be interesting in its own way, but I don't see why you'd juxtapose it with this tutorial, other than that they both involve pixels.

[Const-me]

The project was just an example of HN bias against GPUs. At least for doing graphics on GPUs.

Try searching "GPU" on this site. 100% of the first page of results are about using GPGPU in the clouds. Do you think that matches what people buy GPUs for, or amount of code developers white for them?

[mcbits]

I searched "GPU" and almost all of the top results were people doing weird/unusual things with the GPU: terminal emulator, Postgres query acceleration, stripped down HTML engine, APL compiler, etc. A search of "Direct3D" suggests HN doesn't have much interest in Direct3D, though.

[Const-me]

> weird/unusual things with the GPU: terminal emulator, Postgres query acceleration, stripped down HTML engine, APL compiler

Exactly. People here mostly do general-purpose computations on them, despite “G” stands for graphics.

Search for “Graphics”, and the majority of top results are for CPU-based stuff, pixel graphics in terminal, python, Skia. There’re some results for GPU-based graphics, like graphic studies for MGS and GTA, but they’re minority.

I think graphics is how the majority of users use their hardware for, but it’s under-represented here.