3 ms·

What sort of things will compute shaders on the web unlock that wasn't possible before? Asking as someone with only a little graphics programming experience

h4x0rr 2y ago
Better crypto miners in the browser
ovenchips 2y ago
I think you'll begin to see more advanced particle systems and physical simulations for a start. And 3D Gaussian Splatting will probably benefit too (since compute will probably enable much faster sorting of splats). So it's not really that this stuff wasn't possible before...but compute will enable these techniques to run far faster.
astlouis44 2y ago
Native games on the web.
daredevildave 2y ago
They unlock a lot of advanced graphics techniques that are too slow to do CPU-side but work well in parallel on GPU. It's a pretty wide variety of things, but e.g. lighting, mesh manipulation, terrain, voxels, post-processing.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
pjmlp 2y ago
Basically they bring us back to the days of 3D software rendering algorithms, now however fully accelerated on the graphics card. See offline renders like OTOY, that make use of CUDA. However we could already have gotten them via WebGL Compute, as they are part of OpenGL ES, had its implementation not been sabotaged. https://github.com/9ballsyndrome/WebGL_Compute_shader https://github.com/9ballsyndrome/WebGL_Compute_shader https://registry.khronos.org/webgl/specs/latest/2.0-compute/ https://registry.khronos.org/webgl/specs/latest/2.0-compute/ https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40150444 https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40150444
Eduard 2y ago
With WebGPU, Stable Diffusion in the browser (watch out, once you click the "Generate" button, it will fetch 2 GByte of daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaata) (and probably make your laptop hang whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiile generating, as you can tell by my typing). https://websd.mlc.ai/ https://websd.mlc.ai/

h4x0rr 2y ago

Better crypto miners in the browser

ovenchips 2y ago

I think you'll begin to see more advanced particle systems and physical simulations for a start. And 3D Gaussian Splatting will probably benefit too (since compute will probably enable much faster sorting of splats). So it's not really that this stuff wasn't possible before...but compute will enable these techniques to run far faster.

astlouis44 2y ago

Native games on the web.

daredevildave 2y ago

They unlock a lot of advanced graphics techniques that are too slow to do CPU-side but work well in parallel on GPU. It's a pretty wide variety of things, but e.g. lighting, mesh manipulation, terrain, voxels, post-processing.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

pjmlp 2y ago

Basically they bring us back to the days of 3D software rendering algorithms, now however fully accelerated on the graphics card. See offline renders like OTOY, that make use of CUDA. However we could already have gotten them via WebGL Compute, as they are part of OpenGL ES, had its implementation not been sabotaged. https://github.com/9ballsyndrome/WebGL_Compute_shader https://github.com/9ballsyndrome/WebGL_Compute_shader https://registry.khronos.org/webgl/specs/latest/2.0-compute/ https://registry.khronos.org/webgl/specs/latest/2.0-compute/ https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40150444 https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40150444

Eduard 2y ago

With WebGPU, Stable Diffusion in the browser (watch out, once you click the "Generate" button, it will fetch 2 GByte of daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaata) (and probably make your laptop hang whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiile generating, as you can tell by my typing). https://websd.mlc.ai/ https://websd.mlc.ai/