3D Portability Initiative • Hacker News Board

Re: 3D Portability Initiative

#51

Post by theandrewbailey » Wed, Mar 01, 2017, 2:38 PM UTC

badsectoracula wrote: post #13

Is Khronos going to implement something? Because AFAIK they only write the specs for others to implement them - so it is up to each vendor to make the API available. If Apple and Microsoft aren't going to implement Vulkan, why would they implement something else?

Khronos is an industry standards group. It is composed of companies that implement Khronos APIs. So yes, in a way.

Re: 3D Portability Initiative

#52

Post by Animats » Wed, Mar 01, 2017, 6:50 PM UTC

vardump wrote: post #36

Animats wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebGL must also not perceptibly increase page load times, a few milliseconds is acceptable. Almost every non-trivial WebGL page I've seen shows a "Loading" message for some period of time.

Well, I meant just fixed base cost in milliseconds. In other words, how long it takes to just output something extremely simple, say, a flat shaded triangle without external libraries. Not to measure resource loading and other initialization. Of course initialization and possible shader language, SPIR or whatever compilation will take time on top of that. Many current WebGL apps require a lot of large data, textures,…

Flash had an scheduled loading scheme, so the timeline specified when an asset would be sent as you played a Flash animation. Macromedia had authoring tools which would try to slot the assets in the timeline so they'd be available when needed, while staying under a bandwidth limit.

You could, in theory, do that with WebGL. Google is all fired up about "preloading" lately. This is an authoring tool problem, and if WebGL games get serious, there will probably be author-side tools for this.

Re: 3D Portability Initiative

#53

Post by derefr » Wed, Mar 01, 2017, 9:36 PM UTC

badsectoracula wrote: post #13

Is Khronos going to implement something? Because AFAIK they only write the specs for others to implement them - so it is up to each vendor to make the API available. If Apple and Microsoft aren't going to implement Vulkan, why would they implement something else?

Khronos is a group composed of companies like Apple and Microsoft. If Khronos reaches consensus about something being a good idea, then that necessarily means that the member companies think it's a good idea—and so will implement it.

Re: 3D Portability Initiative

#54

Post by sipos » Wed, Mar 01, 2017, 11:30 PM UTC

This seems like a better approach than Apple's WebGPU in that it is more realistic (depends on using a usable subset of the three APIs that is reasonably common) and, not started by the same company that is the biggest obstacle to cross-platform graphics APIs in the first place.

It seems unfortunate that it is necessary though. It is clear that neither Metal or DirectX can be the cross-platform API we'd all like so, it seems a shame Microsoft and Apple can't just support Vulkan.

Re: 3D Portability Initiative

#55

Post by fulafel » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 5:37 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #23

Who needs a "next generation WebGL?" It's hard to find an interesting or useful WebGL site. There are plenty of demos and ads, but few sites worth visiting. Here, go shoot some zombies. http://www.y8.com/games/abandoned_island That's about as good as it gets.

It's really the only way forward for widely accessible GPU programming, since the native scene is so fragmented and such a kaleidoscope of OS-crashing buggy drivers. Of course it's possible that will remain a niche thing, but with the just arrived WebGL 2 and imminently arriving shared memory in Web Workers there's a lot of new possiblities opening up. All this AI-on-GPU stuff that's in the headlines lately, for example.

The recently discussed Qt remote WebGL app feature is a nice example that you can do even with WebGL 1 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13744631)

Also a lot of non-game 3D customers historically have been inhouse scientific / data visualization users. I suspect many of those are already moving to WebGL & internal web apps, but you won't see them much on public web sites.

It took a good while for interesting or useful JS apps to arrive too...