I should say that is was a BIG shock for me to discover the power of the fragment shaders, procedural rendering and the massive parallelism of the moderm graphic cards. I was crazy about it. The last time I made real time graphics was while programming the Motorola 68000 at 8Mhz of my ATARI 520 ST, trying to draw some pixels on the 320x200 16 colors screen, with 512 KB of RAM. It was like jumping in a time machine for me to discover that shaders uses now high precision floats instead of integers, that fragment shaders runs using GPU massive parallelism, buffers and memory are not a problem, all is 1 million time faster ! And you can do it online with few lines of code in your browser with Shadertoy !