Real-Time GPU-based SPH Fluid Simulation Using Vulkan and OpenGL Compute Shaders

We investigate the potential of Vulkan for fluid animation using smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method. A simple parallel SPH algorithm is devised and implemented in OpenGL Shading Language(GLSL) compute shader. This GLSL code is converted into latest Standard Portable Intermediate Representation (SPIR-V) format and then implemented with Vulkan and OpenGL 4.6. Two test cases are used to verify that the implementations are correct by examining the visual output. The first test case is dropping a cube of water into a box and the second is a dam break in a closed channel, both at room temperature. And finally, we analyze the performance of both implementations in real-time graphic processor unit (GPU). We found that the most optimum of the work group size is 128, and our Vulkan implementation performs faster than OpenGL for 30,000 or greater particles.