101–110 of 405 posts
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.
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No SPIR-V was the cost of getting Apple on board.
Getting Apple on board? Wasn't Apple the originators of the propsal? https://webkit.org/blog/7380/next-generation-3d-graphics-on-... https://webkit.org/wp-content/uploads/webgpu-api-proposal.ht...
Also the original 3D API proposal from Apple was essentially a 1:1 Javascript shim for Metal, which looked quite different from WebGPU.
Apple also originally proposed a custom shading language which looked like - but wasn't quite - HLSL. Compared to that, WGSL is the saner solution (because translation from and to SPIRV is relatively straightforward).
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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.
Anyone know the reason Google created Dawn instead of going with Wgpu? Attachment to C++, or NIH syndrome?
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.
WebGL 2.0 is basically a PS3 / XBox 360 kind of graphics, and WebGPU would be PS4, and that is about it.
All the other cool things, Mesh Shaders, Ray Tracing, Nanite... forget about it, with luck in the next 10 years, if it follows WebGL 2.0 improvements rate.
Chrome and Firefox have supported WebGL since 2011 and WebAssembly since 2017. What is the reason we don't have at early-2010s quality AAA game experiences running in the browser?
We still don't have any debugger quality like Renderdoc, Instruments, PIX, and there is nothing with the quality of Infinity Blade, the game Unreal and Apple used to demo iPhone's GL ES 3.0 capabilties.
Streaming like XBox Cloud seems to be the only path for "AAA game experiences running in the browser".
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These differences are smaller than the differences between desktop GL and WebGL though. It's just another option in the low-level vs high-level 3D API zoo. As far as wrapper APIs go, the native WebGPU implementation libraries are a pretty good option, because being also used in browsers there's a ton of testing and driver bug workarounds going into them which other 3D API wrapper projects simply can't afford to do.
Not at all. First of all, if one depends on SPIR being present, then a SPIR to WGSL compiler needs to be present when deploying to the Web part of WebGPU. Secondly, it will be yet another extension spaghetti that plagues any API that Khronos has some relation to.
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I'm surprised people accept non-bit-identical output. Intel did a lot of damage here with their wacky 80-bit floating point implementation, but really it should be the norm for all languages.
Why would I want bit-identical output? Genuinely curious. I see there's some increase in confidence perhaps, although the result can still be deterministically wrong...
And it can waste a horrendous amount of time if something is non-bit-identical only on a customer machine and not when you try to reproduce it ...
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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.
> Google are the people paying for Chrome, they do not benefit in any way from this kind of fingerprinting. The largest ad company in the world 80% of whose money comes from online advertising does not benefit from tracking...
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> Google are the people paying for Chrome, they do not benefit in any way from this kind of fingerprinting. The largest ad company in the world 80% of whose money comes from online advertising does not benefit from tracking...
Even supposing that Google do benefit from it in that manner, there would be far simpler ways for them to make fingerprinting easier. It's extremely unlikely that this is a significant motivation for adding WebGPU. Not to mention that a lot of the fingerprinting you can potentially do with WebGPU can already be done with WebGL.