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Chrome ships WebGPU

developer.chrome.com

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Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#61

Post by bhouston »

mike_hock wrote: post #9
teruakohatu wrote: post #2

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?

I track population frequency of WebGPU extensions/limits here: https://web3dsurvey.com. The situation currently is much better when WebGL1/WebGL2 but there is still a lot of surface area.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#62

Post by fulafel »

Timja wrote: post #30
mike_hock wrote: post #9

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?

There is no way to escape fingerprinting. Just one example: A script which runs many different types of computations. Each computation will take a certain amount of time depending on your hardware and software. So you will get a fingerprint like this: computation 1: ** computation 2: **** computation 3: ********** computation 4: ** computation 5: ************** computation 6: ************ computation 7: ********* etc…

It's possible to have the runtime execute the computations in fixed time across platforms.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#63

Post by adrian17 »

illiarian wrote: post #34
tormeh wrote: 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

Further, in some ways it's the "lowest common denominator" (so that it can be easily implemented on top of each "underlying" graphics API), with union of all their downsides and only intersection of upsides.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#64

Post by Kelteseth »

bhouston wrote: post #53

And just 2 weeks ago I launched this WebGPU features and limits tracking website: https://web3dsurvey.com It is modelled after the long defunct webglstats website.

Nice! I have linked your site to the Godot WebGPU support proposal issue: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/6646

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#65

Post by foldr »

fulafel wrote: post #62
Timja wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way to escape fingerprinting. Just one example: A script which runs many different types of computations. Each computation will take a certain amount of time depending on your hardware and software. So you will get a fingerprint like this: computation 1: ** computation 2: **** computation 3: ********** computation 4: ** computation 5: ************** computation 6: ************ computation 7: ********* etc…

It's possible to have the runtime execute the computations in fixed time across platforms.

Could you explain what techniques would make this possible? I can see how it's possible in principle, if you, say, compile JS down to bytecode and then have the interpreter time the execution of every instruction. I don't immediately see a way to do it that's compatible with any kind of efficient execution model.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#66

Post by bhouston »

ianpurton wrote: post #50

Is it practical to run machine learning algorithms in parallel with this? I could imagine people loading a webpage to take part in a massive open source training exercise by donating their Gpu time.

Google’s main tensor flow library for the browser runs fastest with its webgl2 backend as compared to cpu so I suspect running it on webgpu is possible and maybe preferred. That said there is a WebNN api that should eventually expose neural network accelerator chips which should be faster and more efficient than GPU at some point.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#67

Post by rado »

xbmcuser wrote: post #52
d--b wrote: post #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...

They count the beta channel as the release channel so if it is in beta channel it is released from here if no bugs are found would be pushed to stable.

Doesn't seem to be in beta, which is still 112.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#69

Post by orra »

j-pb wrote: 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.

No SPIR-V was the cost of getting Apple on board.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#70

Post by pjmlp »

tormeh wrote: 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.

There are lots of ways to write code cross-platform graphics outside the browser, it has been available for decades, it is called middleware.

WebGPU outside of the browser not only suffers the pain of being yet another incompatible shading language, it is also offers the additional possibility of having code incompatible with browsers WebGPU support, due to the use of extensions not available on the browsers.

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