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Chrome ships WebGPU

developer.chrome.com

31–40 of 405 posts

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#31
post #15

I lost all hope for WebGPU after they decided to roll their own ad-hoc shader language that kinda looks like, but is totally not rust. At least with WebGL you had C. Without SPIR-V support this spec is just another tire on the fire that is the modern web.

Ugh... why... (And I say this despite rust being my favorite language ATM)

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#32
Chrome _will_ ship WebGPU in the next update...

Current is 112, WebGPU is 113.

Seriously google, can't you just wait until you actually ship the stuff before you say you shipped it...

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#33
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And to prevent device fingerprinting, all the operations are specified to deterministically produce the same bit-exact results on all hardware, and the feature set is fixed without any support for extensions, right? Or is this yet another information leak anti-feature that we need to disable?

Someone mean would say that this is not a bug, but a feature for the people who are paying for Chrome.

Google are the people paying for Chrome, they do not benefit in any way from this kind of fingerprinting. To the contrary, it decreases the value of their browser monopoly.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#34
post #6

This is HUGE news. Webgpu solves the incentives problem where all actors tries to lock you in to their graphics/compute ecosystem by abstracting over them. It's already the best way to code cross-platform graphics outside the browser. This release in Chrome ought to bring lots more developer mindshare to it, which is an awesome thing.

> This is HUGE news. Webgpu solves the incentives problem where all actors tries to lock you in to their graphics/compute ecosystem by abstracting over them.

Instead we have a third graphics standard (after canvas and WebGL) fully incompatible with the previous two that does exactly that: abstracts the OS graphics stack in a new layer

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#35

In case you confused this with webgl as I did: > WebGPU is a new API for the web, which exposes modern hardware capabilities and allows rendering and computation operations on a GPU, similar to Direct3D 12, Metal, and Vulkan. Unlike the WebGL family of APIs, WebGPU offers access to more advanced GPU features and provides first-class support for general computations on the GPU.

And to prevent device fingerprinting, all the operations are specified to deterministically produce the same bit-exact results on all hardware, and the feature set is fixed without any support for extensions, right? Or is this yet another information leak anti-feature that we need to disable?

> all the operations are specified to deterministically produce the same bit-exact results on all hardware,

I want this so badly. A compiler flag perhaps, that enables running the same program with the exact output bit for bit on any platform, perhaps by doing the same thing as a reference platform (any will do), even if it has a performance penalty.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#36
post #6

This is HUGE news. Webgpu solves the incentives problem where all actors tries to lock you in to their graphics/compute ecosystem by abstracting over them. It's already the best way to code cross-platform graphics outside the browser. This release in Chrome ought to bring lots more developer mindshare to it, which is an awesome thing.

or it will be yet another standard

Not really. I don't see how any of the vendors could break it without being extremely overt about it. And it has no direct competition. Nothing else runs on any OS and any GPU, except WebGL, which is abandoned.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#37
post #15

I lost all hope for WebGPU after they decided to roll their own ad-hoc shader language that kinda looks like, but is totally not rust. At least with WebGL you had C. Without SPIR-V support this spec is just another tire on the fire that is the modern web.

"ad-hoc shader language that kinda looks like, but is totally not rust." But is that language actually bad, or is it just not your favourite language? What don't you like about it?

No idea what the comment about Rust means, but we already have several shader languages. There was literally no reason to invent another incompatible one

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#39
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or it will be yet another standard

Not really. I don't see how any of the vendors could break it without being extremely overt about it. And it has no direct competition. Nothing else runs on any OS and any GPU, except WebGL, which is abandoned.

> I don't see how any of the vendors could break it without being extremely overt about it.

> except WebGL, which is abandoned.

So it can be abandoned

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#40
Soon, there will be no need to install softwares to the computer. A modern browser will cover it all.

What scares me is browsers getting bloated with all kinds of features while webapps getting bigger and bigger in size for no reason.

Note, I am all for this feature getting widely adopted.

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