4 ms·
The transmission/storage size of shaders isn't important. Textures and 3D models dominate in any non trivial project. Kind of like dieting by trimming your toen
by mantap 7y ago
The transmission/storage size of shaders isn't important. Textures and 3D models dominate in any non trivial project. Kind of like dieting by trimming your toenails.
- jacobolus 7y agoThat’s maybe true for current 3D graphics heavy projects, but is not necessarily true for any arbitrary future use of GPU compute.
- mantap 7y agoGPUs are machines for crunching data, be it graphics or NNs. I can't think of many use case where that isn't true. Also if you anticipate the GPU being used as an accelerator, that is all the more reason to use a text based format because it allows for easy code generation.
- jfkebwjsbx 7y agoYou are wrong. Many projects use GPUs without big datasets. See ShaderToy, for instance: a lot of computation, almost no input data. Many other games, too: they may use the GPU for rendering fast yet have say 50 MiB of textures and assets only. If you think of AAA games, ML and whatnot, of course. But I doubt anybody will use WebGPU for those, to be honest.
- mantap 7y ago50MB of textures is a lot compared to shader source code size, which will be in the kilobytes for such a small project. The same with shadertoy, the storage or transmission of a shadertoy shader is never going to be significant compared to all the assets on the page. The contention was that a binary representation is necessary to save space for storage or transmission. It just isn't.