#glsl

Creating a deferred render pipeline in a fragment shader..

What could go wrong?

Faint screaming

Acid Cam GPU / ACMX2 — Real-Time CUDA-Accelerated Visual Effects Demo | Webcam + Audio Reactive

The audio I used to create this video is not included due to Copyright concerns. Demonstrating ACMX2 and acidcam-gpu — a real-time video effects engine powered by NVIDIA CUDA and OpenCV compiled with CUDA support. Watch as live webcam footage is transformed through 736 GPU filter kernels running entirely on the graphics card, with every pixel processed in parallel across thousands of GPU threads.

What You're Seeing: • Live webcam input processed through a two-stage GPU pipeline: CUDA compute kernels for pixel-level effects, followed by GLSL fragment shaders for full-frame post-processing • 736 stackable CUDA filters — temporal trails, geometric distortions, color manipulation, glitch/noise, bitwise XOR operations, wave effects, kaleidoscopes, and more • Filters chain in real-time: each filter's output feeds directly into the next, all within a single kernel launch — no CPU round-trips • Audio-reactive mode: microphone/line input drives visual parameters so the effects pulse and shift with sound amplitude • Zero-copy GPU pipeline via CUDA/OpenGL PBO interop — frames never leave the GPU between the CUDA and shader stages

Technical Stack:

• CUDA 12.x — one thread per pixel, 2M+ threads in parallel at 1080p • OpenCV with CUDA support — GpuMat frame history ring buffer stored entirely in device memory • OpenGL + GLSL 330 — Shader passes with ping-pong framebuffers • Qt6 interface (ACMX2) for filter selection, shader pass ordering, and session management • C++20 / MXWrite (FFmpeg wrapper) for video encoding • Runs on Linux with NVIDIA RTX hardware (developed on RTX 2070) Why It Looks Different Every Frame: Filter order matters — the same set of filters in a different order produces completely different visuals. On top of that, per-frame parameters (alpha oscillation, frame history index sweeps, random seeds, square size modulation) continuously evolve, so the output is never static. The combinatorial space of filter orderings × shader pass stacks × parameter evolution is effectively infinite

Demo of new interface / updated bug fixes for Acid Cam v2 Qt. There is a new Windows build on the GitHub page. There is a link on my website in the downloads section.