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WebGPU and WSL in Safari

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Re: WebGPU and WSL in Safari

#81

Post by mehmetoguzderin »

The course of development with WebGPU initiative is breathtaking. The effort poured into the API is producing content that will be consumed by people that desire to study GPGPU applications.

Included in the final specification or not, a well-tailored shading language is only of benefit to the GPGPU community, similar to how simultaneous existence of DirectX, Metal, Vulkan has been to the robustness of the abstractions of the engines built upon them. No one should doubt the rigor of developers that are shaping the WSL specification; they are experts in their game. Moreover, the web mode of SPIR-V will also have considerable differences in its morph, and all parties are trying to find a good common denominator where none of the existing works is an exact solution; the work of Apple here will benefit everybody going forward.

Also, we are getting GPGPU computing abilities in the browser for a much broader market on many form factors! Let's prepare for it!

Re: WebGPU and WSL in Safari

#83

Post by bla3 »

modeless wrote: post #71
dman wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the years where inspite of all its flaws, OpenGL was a non deprecated option on all the platforms. I know it left performance on the table, I know the drivers for some vendors were iffy and I know reasoning about performance across different vendors / drivers / platforms was difficult - but it worked most of the time and allowed me to have a mostly unified codebase everywhere.

You can still kind of have that experience by using ANGLE[1] as your OpenGL implementation. It lets you use the same dialect of OpenGL ES on Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android, with consistent behavior across platforms. ANGLE is the base of the WebGL implementation in Chrome. For WebGPU, we (Google) are working on a new native library called Dawn[2] that will fill the same role that ANGLE does for WebGL. I'm personally…

That's nice, but it's a pretty big dependency to add.

Re: WebGPU and WSL in Safari

#84

Post by xigency »

om2 wrote: post #59
pcwalton wrote: post #55

As a cross-platform graphics developer who is currently knee-deep in papering over platform incompatibilities, what I mostly care about at this point is compatibility . I don't care about shader size or compilation time, as long as both are reasonable. I do care about having yet another shading language to cross-compile to. Please, everyone, just use something that already exists. It is frustrating how the big player…

The only thing that already exists that is provably web-safe is the WebGL dialect of GLSL (which no one seems to like). WebSPIR-V would be based on SPIR-V but in many ways has to be a new thing as well. Edit: I originally said "WebGPU dialect of GLSL" which is not a thing. I meant "WebGL dialect of GLSL", which is a thing and which works ok in practice.

Are there any technical obstacles to using GLSL with WebGPU? It's popular with some people.

See: https://www.shadertoy.com/

Re: WebGPU and WSL in Safari

#85

Post by modeless »

zelly wrote: post #4

is tensorflow going to use this?

Tensorflow.js will probably add a WebGPU backend when WebGPU becomes widely available in browsers. But that won't by itself close the performance gap with native ML libraries. For that there is a new W3C community group specifically looking at ways of adding machine learning acceleration to the web: https://www.w3.org/community/webmachinelearning/

Re: WebGPU and WSL in Safari

#86

Post by pjmlp »

pcwalton wrote: post #55

As a cross-platform graphics developer who is currently knee-deep in papering over platform incompatibilities, what I mostly care about at this point is compatibility . I don't care about shader size or compilation time, as long as both are reasonable. I do care about having yet another shading language to cross-compile to. Please, everyone, just use something that already exists. It is frustrating how the big player…

I rather care about middleware that takes advantage of best hardware integration in each platform, instead of bare bones APIs full of endless extensions, which are only portable in theory, with "portable code" full of OEM specific code paths.

Re: WebGPU and WSL in Safari

#87

Post by pjmlp »

dman wrote: post #66
pcwalton wrote: post #55

As a cross-platform graphics developer who is currently knee-deep in papering over platform incompatibilities, what I mostly care about at this point is compatibility . I don't care about shader size or compilation time, as long as both are reasonable. I do care about having yet another shading language to cross-compile to. Please, everyone, just use something that already exists. It is frustrating how the big player…

I miss the years where inspite of all its flaws, OpenGL was a non deprecated option on all the platforms. I know it left performance on the table, I know the drivers for some vendors were iffy and I know reasoning about performance across different vendors / drivers / platforms was difficult - but it worked most of the time and allowed me to have a mostly unified codebase everywhere.

Only when "all platforms" leaves out game consoles, which never had full support for OpenGL, besides a timid attempt with GL ES 1.0 + Cg on PS2.

Re: WebGPU and WSL in Safari

#88

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

Jasper_ wrote: post #14

Web Shading Language is a non-starter. I looked quite closely at the specification. Apple has argued in the WebGPU WG that SPIR-V is not defined enough, semantically, to be meaningful, but WSL is even worse. Sometimes, it's even explained in terms of SPIR-V, like in the case of discard, where it was hastily explained in terms of SPIR-V's OpKill after we identified it was completely missing. Apple has blocked any poss…

If we can compile GLSL, GLSL ES, HLSL and OpenCL C to SPIR-V, and we can use SPIR-V in OpenGL, Vulkan and OpenCL, then why on earth can't WebGPU just use SPIR-V? If it's not safe enough, then define a safe subset or safety extensions with strict validation. If it's not Appley enough, then write a Metal Shading Language to SPIR-V compiler (the reverse has already been done). Hell, if SPIR-V really is too low-level, GLSL ES already exists in WebGL and is plenty friendly and capable. But surely the graphics world doesn't need yet another GPU language?

Re: WebGPU and WSL in Safari

#89

Post by pjmlp »

markdog12 wrote: post #50

Anyone from other browser vendors care to comment? Would love to know their progress and what they think of SPIR-V/WSL.

Here are Google WebGPU efforts:

https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Implementation-Status

Which already mentioned on the standard meetings that although Chrome already ships a prototype implementation of Web Compute, they don't plan to fully productise it, rather take the learnings from the community into WebGPU shaders.

Re: WebGPU and WSL in Safari

#90

Post by kvark »

pcwalton wrote: post #55

As a cross-platform graphics developer who is currently knee-deep in papering over platform incompatibilities, what I mostly care about at this point is compatibility . I don't care about shader size or compilation time, as long as both are reasonable. I do care about having yet another shading language to cross-compile to. Please, everyone, just use something that already exists. It is frustrating how the big player…

> Please, everyone, just use something that already exists.

Says one "who is currently knee-deep in papering over platform incompatibilities", instead of using one of the solutions that do it for you.

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