Comment

Comment by unconed

"What promises were made, by whom?"

Technically true, but practically tone deaf.

WebGPU is both years too late, and just a bit early. Wheras WebGL was OpenGL circa 2005, WebGPU is native graphics circa 2015. It shouldn't need to be said that the bleeding edge new standard for web graphics shouldn't be both 10 years out of date and awful.

Vendors are finally starting to deprecate the old binding model as the byzantine machinery that it is. Bindless resources are an absolute necessity for the modern style of rendering with nanite and raytracing.

Rust's WGPU on native supports some of this, but WebGPU itself doesn't.

It's only intuitive if you don't realize just how huge the gap is between dispatching a vertex shader to render some triangles, and actually producing a lit, shaded and occlusioned image with PBR, indirect lighting, antialiasing and postfx. Would you like to render high quality lines or points? Sorry, it's not been a priority to make that simple. Better go study up on SDFs and beziers.

Which, tbh, is the impression I get from webgpu efforts. Everyone forgets the drivers have been playing pretend for decades, and very few have actually done the homework. Of those that have, most are too enamored with being a l33t gfx coder to realize how terrible the dev exp is.

parent unconed 1 year ago

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton