VL.Fuse VS ComputeSharp

Check out Fuse[1/2]. It's an open source library for visually programming on the GPU. It is built for use in the visual programming environment vvvv[3].

VVVV itself is based on .Net and you can extend its functionality by either writing nodes in C# or import just about every existing .Net library just by referencing it or installing it as nuget. No need for wrappers[4]. For rendering vvvv uses the Stride [5] game engine which comes with a really neat shader system / language which is basically a superset of HLSL [6]. In vvvv those shaders are represented as nodes and you can open them in your favorite text editor directly from the vvvv evironment, edit the code, save and the changed result will instantly be loaded in vvvv[7].

[1]https://www.thefuselab.io

[2]https://github.com/TheFuseLab/VL.Fuse

[3]https://visualprogramming.net

[4]https://thegraybook.vvvv.org/reference/extending/overview.ht...

[5]https://www.stride3d.net

[6]https://doc.stride3d.net/latest/en/manual/graphics/effects-a...

[7]https://thegraybook.vvvv.org/reference/libraries/3d/shaders....

We're using it as render engine for our visual live-programming environment vvvv: https://visualprogramming.net It allows you to play around with the engine fairly quickly. To get an impression, here is an intro tutorial that shows it in action: https://youtu.be/Cs60A_pSIy0 Also check out FUSE which builds on top of vvvv/stride: https://www.thefuselab.io/

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.