ComputeSharp VS ILGPU

A couple other options than what has been suggested so far: - TerraFX.Interop.Windows. Raw, blittable, 1:1 bindings for all Win32, D2D/D3D11/D3D12 APIs (there's also a version with Vulkan bindings). As close to doing #include as you can get in C#. This is my personal favorite, I use it in my own ComputeSharp library, and transitively we use it in the Microsoft Store too 🙂 - Silk.NET another version of high-performance bindings, more opinionated than TerraFX and with some additional helpers to make it a bit easier to use.

A hello world .NET console app with NativeAOT is 1.08 MB. Goes down to 1.08 MB with some tweaking. Goes below 1MB with more tweaking. I have a fully self-contained NativeAOT sample app that renders some fancy animated shaders with DX12 that's about 2MB in size.

I dont think it's exactly what you're looking for, but I've found ComputeSharp to be a great C# GPU tool

Here's some: - MVVM Toolkit - PolySharp - ComputeSharp

If you don't mind being Windows only, I would also recommend trying out (shameless plug) ComputeSharp. You can find it on NuGet and it's available for UWP and WinUI 3 as well with ready to use XAML controls. The point is that it would allow you do your entire rendering via pixel/compute shaders, so it could basically run entirely on the GPU. That'd allow you to render even millions of particles with pretty good performance 🙂

Create a UWP or WinUI 3 applicaation and use the AnimatedComputeShaderPanel from ComputeSharp. The library lets you write shaders (ie. code to run on the GPU) entirely in C#, and handles all the logic to setup a DX12 animated swapchain, similar to Win2D. If you look at the repo you can also see a whole bunch of examples, which you can also try out for yourself. There's also several wiki pages with lots of info.

I've had a good experience with ILGPU: clean API, loads of samples, nice community. Apologies for a shameless plug, but I used it in one of my projects and happened to write a blog post about it: https://timiskhakov.github.io/posts/computing-the-convex-hull-on-gpu. Hope it helps!

https://github.com/Sergio0694/ComputesSharp is always being recommended to me. But I also just found this one https://github.com/m4rs-mt/ILGPU which looks very interesting. There are a lot of libraries which allow you to execute on the gpu

I would checkout the github for more details, or ask on the discord for more specifics, but all the kernels are compiled into IL by the C# compiler, then at runtime the ILGPU compiler converts them from IL into PTX, OpenCL, or back into IL (in a special way to maintain thread grouping and stuff). Then PTX / OpenCL /IL is compiled and run using the respective runtimes. Cuda for PTX, the OpenCL runtime for OpenCL, and .net for IL. We have talked about creating a CPU execution path that tries to match speeds with CPU code, but I do not think it is a big priority.

Github repo