Tips for incorporating a randomly generated number in WGSL!

Looking to implement a fragment shader within a WebGPU application to generate a black and white image noise effect. For more information on white noise, you can refer to White noise (wikipedia).

The goal is for each pixel to have a random color value. I've attempted the following approach:

[[stage(fragment)]]
fn main() -> [[location(0)]] vec4<f32> {
  let color: f32 = random();
  return vec4<f32>(color, color, color, 1.0);
}

However, it seems that WGSL does not offer a built-in function to generate random numbers, as indicated in the specifications. Is there a workaround or alternative method to incorporate random number generation within the fragment shader for each fragment?

Answer №1

In both WGSL and GLSL, there is no built-in random functionality available, so developers need to create their own RNG (Random Number Generator) for these languages. One common approach is to either generate random numbers on the CPU and pass them into the shader as a uniform, or to implement the RNG algorithm directly within the shader itself, as suggested by @skmr.

One potential algorithm that could be used for this purpose can be found here:

Answer №2

When converting parallel code from CUDA to OpenCL some years ago, I encountered a similar issue. Fortunately, I discovered an excellent solution in the random123 library: https://github.com/DEShawResearch/random123. This library offers several "counter-based random number generators," which produce the Nth pseudo-random number in a sequence when provided with the index N (unlike traditional RNGs that calculate the next value based on the previous one and therefore cannot be parallelized).

Update: I have successfully converted the "threefry2x32" random number generator (from the random123 library) from C to javascript/WGSL, and it functions well. I intend to communicate with the random123 author/maintainer to discuss the possibility of incorporating this into their repository. It is important to me to ensure compliance with their copyright guidelines.

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