I'm realizing my post was wrong because I didn't realize what becool meant by compute shaders. But, now that I know, I don't really know how this would help improve the game. Nor do I understand how Oxygen Not Included would have been improved by having computational tasks executed on the GPU. Also, the only benefit you get is from getting to be able to write your code in parallel, which is harder and takes more learning. I agree that I don't think that it will replace CPUs doing the work because 1) CPUs aren't "slower", they just can't run code in parallel 2) Most games won't have the need to put CPU computation on the GPU. Also, using compute shaders can make some graphics cards incompatible, which you don't want.
If done with minimal cpu readbacks you can get massive performance boosts especially with simulations that have lots of units or pawns. Parallel computing is ideal for processing tons of units. For example most games seem to start losing FPS when 100-200 units processed at once? With GPU compute and the right architecture with minimal cpu readbacks you can get in the hundreds of thousands with 60FPS, im running 20+fps with over half a million units at once. I know because that’s what I’m doing with my BeeCool project. Imagine having millions of dwarfs in DF? Or running City Skylines in fast forward at like 60FPS with a giant city? Although I think the compute shaders would be worth it the most on 2D actually because having the compute shaders and a lot of fancy 3D graphics might really hit the GPU hard.
The only way to program it solo is with codex ai agent though. Compute shaders are hard to crack. I had to come up with a custom way to do it I used Unity and instanced rendering, so the simulation is done with compute shaders and the graphics are rendered all on the GPU at the same time with minimal CPU callback. Because that is what tanks performance so you have to be careful how and when you ping the CPU.
Below is a screenshot from my BeeCool project I have an in game counter this is at one hour, 24FPS 462,364 "bees".
