windows-terminal-shaders VS ComputeSharp

Yea the extent to which you can make custom terminal shaders for the Windows Terminal is pretty unbelievable. This repo has a huge collection of crazy stuff (including a better CRT one):

https://github.com/Hammster/windows-terminal-shaders

I made a CRT retro shader for Windows terminal, you can find the code for the shader here :) https://github.com/Hammster/windows-terminal-shaders

https://github.com/Hammster/windows-terminal-shaders#example-setting

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.