[Voxilla]

Here a quite fast mandelbrot viewer, making use of DX11 and the DirectCompute API.

The set is calculated with up to 1024 iterations. Making use of the horsepower of DX11 GPUs enables real-time panning and zooming even at high resolution.

Two versions are included, a scalar one and a vectorized computation version.
Both generate the same output. The vectorized version was made after suboptimal performance on the ATI HD 5870 with scalar calculation.
Compared to the scalar version it runs twice faster on this GPU. Here we see the backside of a non scalar GPU architecture.
On forthcoming scalar Nvidia DX11 GPUs, probably the scalar version will run faster. Writing a vectorized compute shader is substantial more complicated.

On the HD 5870 computational throughput is well over 1.5 TFLOPS/s.

Full source code is included.
Remark that no drawing code was needed. It is possible to directly write to the backbuffer from the compute shader.

By pressing the space bar the calculation can be switched between scalar and vectorized.
Zooming in and out can be done with the left and right mouse button.
Panning is with moving the mouse. With the mouse inside an invisible quarter screen sized centered circle, panning stops.
With the A and Z keys the color can be cycled.
ALT + Enter goes to full screen.