3 ms·

It really isn't true. It doesn't just work. I'm running Chrome 38 on a modern desktop PC and it doesn't render at a reasonable frame rate.

Someone1234 12y ago
You're missing the point. WebGL runs everywhere that is objectively a Good Thing™. Your criticism is aimed at the optimisation rather than the technology. The person who created this could, theoretically, add a little slider to let you adjust the visual quality to meet your PC's performance characteristics. Additionally WebGL can also be utilised for things which only get rendered once (e.g. single 3D frames). Like generating 3D graphs for one suitable example.
- jonas21 12y ago
  > The person who created this could, theoretically, add a little slider to let you adjust the visual quality to meet your PC's performance characteristics. If they wanted to, they could even auto-scale the quality based on frame-rate to ensure that everybody had a good experience.
- badname 12y ago
  Cool but had to close the window 'cause CPU fans were creating turbulence in the room.
acdha 12y ago
Check out chrome://gpu to see whether your specific driver is blacklisted - it sounds like you're hitting software rendering. GL becoming a mainstream feature has put pressure on vendors to ship fixes for known bugs – the Chrome team usually links to the actual bug reports so you can see why something is disabled. Right now, this is still maturing – e.g. for me that demo runs great even on an old iPhone 4S, 2010 MacBook Air, etc. but on a lowest-bidder Dell laptop with the cheapest possible Intel integrated graphics, it struggles. One hardware generation refresh, however, and even the cheap equipment is adequate for many uses - after all, that 2010 MBA was only $1k 4 years ago. The upshot is that the excitement is because this is finally reaching the point where support will have matured by the time most people will ship a serious app. There are already some interesting WebGL-only applications like Polarr (https://www.polarr.co/editor https://www.polarr.co/editor) which suggest that the model is already plausible for many projects.

Someone1234 12y ago

You're missing the point. WebGL runs everywhere that is objectively a Good Thing™. Your criticism is aimed at the optimisation rather than the technology. The person who created this could, theoretically, add a little slider to let you adjust the visual quality to meet your PC's performance characteristics. Additionally WebGL can also be utilised for things which only get rendered once (e.g. single 3D frames). Like generating 3D graphs for one suitable example.

jonas21 12y ago
> The person who created this could, theoretically, add a little slider to let you adjust the visual quality to meet your PC's performance characteristics. If they wanted to, they could even auto-scale the quality based on frame-rate to ensure that everybody had a good experience.
badname 12y ago
Cool but had to close the window 'cause CPU fans were creating turbulence in the room.

acdha 12y ago

Check out chrome://gpu to see whether your specific driver is blacklisted - it sounds like you're hitting software rendering. GL becoming a mainstream feature has put pressure on vendors to ship fixes for known bugs – the Chrome team usually links to the actual bug reports so you can see why something is disabled. Right now, this is still maturing – e.g. for me that demo runs great even on an old iPhone 4S, 2010 MacBook Air, etc. but on a lowest-bidder Dell laptop with the cheapest possible Intel integrated graphics, it struggles. One hardware generation refresh, however, and even the cheap equipment is adequate for many uses - after all, that 2010 MBA was only $1k 4 years ago. The upshot is that the excitement is because this is finally reaching the point where support will have matured by the time most people will ship a serious app. There are already some interesting WebGL-only applications like Polarr (https://www.polarr.co/editor https://www.polarr.co/editor) which suggest that the model is already plausible for many projects.