OpenGL 4.3 experiment with compute shaders, and tons of instanced geometry! Targets libretro GL as a backend.

Purpose of the compute shader is to do frustum culling, LOD-sorting and some simple physics for fun.

After compute shader, indirect drawing is used to draw instanced geometry. The indirect drawing buffer is updated with atomic counters from compute shader.

The LOD-sorting allows us to instance few but complex meshes when we're close, and progressively less and less detail per instance. Last LOD is just point sprites.

The number of blocks in play is ~850k. With my nVidia GTX760, I can get roughly 300-500 FPS up to 1000 FPS depending on the scene complexity after culling.

LOD0: Blender monkey (Suzanne) (diffuse + specular lighting)
LOD1: Cube (diffuse lighting)
LOD2: Point sprites

YouTube

make -f Makefile.libretro

This targets libretro GL interface, so you need RetroArch installed. After building,

retroarch -L boxes_libretro.so

should run the program. GLFW target might be implemented at some point if there's interest.