ShaderEmu Boots Linux Inside a Pixel Shader, Runs Doom in VRChat
Michael_Moroz_ · x · 2026-10-17
Developer Michael Moroz open-sourced ShaderEmu: a complete 32-bit RISC-V computer emulated entirely in a pixel shader, capable of booting Linux to a desktop, with its own emulated GPU, and running Doom. The target is VRChat, which only allows Direct3D 11 graphics shaders (no compute shaders, no UAVs), so the whole machine lives in textures rewritten by fragment shaders each frame.
Technical notes from the author:
- Performance comes from optimizing games heavily and spreading work across as many cores as possible; the GPU emulates a 256-core slow RISC-V CPU at roughly 4MIPS per core
- Requires a beefy GPU: GPUs are poor CPU emulators, and clock speed and latency matter more than core count
- The author believes Half Life should be feasible with this approach
MIT-licensed on GitHub, currently 18 stars.
Related event: ShaderEmu boots Linux inside VRChat using only a pixel shader(2 posts)→
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