2048x2048 Shader Game of Life

Instructions: click to spawn life in a cell, right click and drag to pan, scroll or pinch on mobile to zoom, hold shift and drag to rotate.

A Conway's Game of Life simulation that runs entirely on the GPU. My laptop doesn't have the best video card, but I was able to run a 4096 square version with a little instability. I use two RenderTargets as FBO's and ping pong between them every other render cycle. In this way, each iteration happens entirely on the GPU, and we can use its massively parallel architecture to make short work of this kind of simulation. It is mapped 1:1 (hopefully) with your screen, so each cell in the simulation should take up exactly one pixel, so if you have a retina display, maybe invest in a jeweler's loupe and view the 1:1 pixel mapped version.

Special thanks to this StackOverflow post and this writeup by Chris Wellons.