title: General purpose compute with Vertex/Pixel shaders (Open GL / DirectX)
body: <p>I have a question regarding compute shaders. are compute shaders available in DX 9? would it be still possible to use a compute shader with a DX9 driver if there is no compute shader fragment on the GPU? ( SGX 545 does not have it, but SGX 6X generation is going to have it), as far as what IMG says. I would like to know If i can do some simple general purpose programming on SGXs GPUs with DirectX9 or OpenGL drivers. </p>
  
  <p>Also, is there anyway I can use OpenGL vertex shaders for GPGPU programming? Here is what I am thinking: 
    I will load my Matrices/ data into the vertex buffer, and bind them to the program context. I will load some other static variables into the uniform variables, and my actual compute program into vertex shader. It looks feisible till this point ( does it? )  but the output from the vertex shader will go through rasterization and will be fed to fragment shader ( according to how things go in openGL). Is there anyway I can prevent the data to be going through whole of the graphics pipleline, or can I intercept after vertex shader is done with executing, and somehow read the values and time taken for execution?</p>