Look ma! 32M Particles with no buffers! In a recent job interview I was asked to design a particle system. What came to my mind was using a buffer to keep track of the state of each individual particle, however it felt wrong, like there must be a way to do it without buffers.

(Vid here [sorry] https://x.com/MZyanide/status/1826863235422953742)

Mr Zyanide (@MZyanide) on X

Look ma! 32M Particles with no buffers! In a recent job interview I was asked to design a particle system. What came to my mind was using a buffer to keep track of the state of each individual particle, however it felt wrong, like there must be a way to do it without buffers.

X (formerly Twitter)
Lo and behold! Just a mesh shader. This implementation is very simple, the particle is emitted and it's trajectory is dictated by projectile motion. I'm sure more interesting things can be done but I decided to stop here before things got out of hand.