ast year I wrote a program to highlight the difference between computing in software versus hardware. I ended up creating two programs to calculate the Mandelbrot set. One was written to allow multiple CPU cores to perform the number crunching, while the other used the GPU to do the work.

Below is a screen capture of the GPU version of the program. It is able to calculate every Mandelbrot point on the screen so quickly, I decided to add a few nice extra features including lasso zooming, realtime panning and animation effects, and manual coordinate entry. As a final improvement I upgraded the GPU code to improve the level of detail several factors by changing in the shader code all the important float based types to ones based on the double type.

Video: Exploring Mandelbrot

Click on the video above to see a demonstration of my GPU based Mandelbrot set program in action.