Plurrrr

Shadertoy is a wonderful tool which lets users create and share a type of program called a fragment shader online. The true magic of shadertoy is its community of very talented graphics programmers who build incredible works of art despite having access to only a sliver of the traditional graphics pipeline.

Some of these shaders are very computationally intensive and even in a small window, they crawl along well below their intended 60 frames per second on my old laptop. Inspired by a technique in the VR community called Foveated Rendering, I decided to try to optimize these shaders by only rendering a fully detailed image within a small focal region. As you move away from the focal point the image quality decreases.

Gradient boosting is a machine learning technique for regression and classification where multiple models are trained sequentially with each model trying to learn the mistakes from the previous models. The individual models are known as weak learners and in the case of gradient boosted decision trees the individual models are decision trees.