Simulating a Planet on the GPU: Part 1 — Patrick Celentano

A developer shares their journey building a realistic planet simulation inspired by SimEarth. Starting with polygon-based approaches using Delaunay Triangulation and Voronoi Tessellation, they hit performance limits with CPU-based calculations. The breakthrough came from switching to GPU compute shaders and implementing Smoothed-Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) to simulate tectonic plates, ocean currents, and atmospheric conditions. The post details technical challenges including cubemap representations, memory optimization strategies, and the discovery that computation is cheap but memory is expensive on GPUs. Future plans include adding weather systems, precipitation, volcanic activity, and various rock types.