Why pretend? A texture is just an array of floats. The thing preventing you, the programmer, from seeing it as something beyond an "image" is really yourself. In modern graphics, we use textures to represent all kinds of data. Projections onto different spherical harmonic modes, luminance histograms, atmospheric data, etc.

A texture is just data and a shader mutates that in a highly parallel way with specific coherence semantics. Before knocking it, I suggest educating yourself a bit more.

What are we pretending here? A GPU is designed to do multiplication. We're doing multiplication. Calling it "texture" or "shading" or whatever else is only because of the GPU's root in gaming, otherwise the problems are exactly the same.

Yeah I don't see how I stepped on any toes. Deep learning libraries have always been a pain in the ass to install. And only support some OSes and GPUs. There's nothing wrong with JS or webgl, but it seems an incredibly inelegant choice for this.

pip install tensorflow is pretty darn easy....

Granted it doesn't have AMD support, I'm fairly confident even the CPUs can out perform the javascript library.

I wasn't aware it worked at all on Windows now, that's cool. Doesn't seem very simple to install though. This is the installation guide for just one of the prerequisites: http://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-installation-guide-microsof... And as you mention, only Nvidia.

Cuda and cuDNN; good times :) Not cross platform, but nvidia does supply a bunch of packages now for different OS's to get that stuff installed.