Wow, this could be huge for enabling more efficient rendering of also more basic animations and effects on the web making it a smooth experience.
Chrome ships WebGPU
81–90 of 405 posts
Re: Chrome ships WebGPU
#82I 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.
...it's not quite as simple:
http://kvark.github.io/spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html
WebGPU would most likely have to create its own subset of SPIRV anyway to fulfill the additional safety and validation requirements of the web platform.
Re: Chrome ships WebGPU
#83I 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.
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...
Re: Chrome ships WebGPU
#84Earlier 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?
I wish all information-leaky browser features were turned off by default and I could easily turn them on on demand when needed. Like, the browser could detect that a webpage accesses one of them and tells me that I am currently experiencing a degraded experience which I could improve by turning this slider on.
I've set up my Firefox with resistFingerprinting but without an auto deny on canvas access.
It's sickening to see how often web pages still profile you, but the setting seems to work.
Similarly, on Android there's a Chromium fork called Bromite that shows JIT, WebRTC, and WebGL as separate permissions, denied by default. I only use it for when broken websites don't work right on Firefox, but websites seem to function fine without all those permissions being enabled by default.
Competent websites will tell you the necessary settings ("WebGL is not available") so making the websites work isn't much trouble. I'd much rather see those error messages than getting a "turn on canvas fingerprinting for a better experience" popup from my browser every time I try to visit blogs or news websites.
Re: Chrome ships WebGPU
#85Earlier 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.
This would essentially mean that every computation would have to run as slow as the slowest supported hardware. It would completely undermine the entire point of supporting hardware acceleration.
I’m sympathetic to the privacy concerns but this isn’t a solution worth considering.
Re: Chrome ships WebGPU
#86This 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.
AFAIK the WebGPU implementations outside the browser can all load SPIRV directly, no need to translate to WGSL first.
Re: Chrome ships WebGPU
#87Chrome 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?
Re: Chrome ships WebGPU
#88Anyone know the reason Google created Dawn instead of going with Wgpu? Attachment to C++, or NIH syndrome?
Re: Chrome ships WebGPU
#89I 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.
Syntax-wise GLSL is a mess and having a new language to work with is like a breath of fresh air.
Re: Chrome ships WebGPU
#90Earlier 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…
You only get fingerprinting from your method if the variation of the “fingerprint“ between two different runs by the same user is lower than the difference you get between two different users. This is far from obvious since it depends a lot on the workload running on the machine at the time. I'm not aware of a single fingerprinting tool that primarily use this king of timing attack rather than more traditional finger…
Not sure if the workload makes a difference.
We would have to make examples of what Computation1 is and what Computation2 is to make a prediction if certain types of workloads will impact the ratio of their performance.
Example:
s=performance.now();
r=0;
for (i=0; i