Compute shaders operate differently from other shader stages. All of the other shader stages have a well-defined set of input values, some built-in and some user-defined. The frequency at which a shader stage executes is specified by the nature of that stage; vertex shaders execute once per input vertex, for example (though some executions can be skipped via caching). Fragment shader execution is defined by the fragments generated from the rasterization process.

Compute shaders work very differently. The "space" that a compute shader operates on is largely abstract; it is up to each compute shader to decide what the space means. The number of compute shader executions is defined by the function used to execute the compute operation. Most important of all, compute shaders have no user-defined inputs and no outputs at all. The built-in inputs only define where in the "space" of execution a particular compute shader invocation is.

Therefore, if a compute shader wants to take some values as input, it is up to the shader itself to fetch that data, via texture access, arbitrary image load, shader storage blocks, or other forms of interface. Similarly, if a compute shader is to actually compute anything, it must explicitly write to an image or shader storage block.