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Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

Can I have it in WebGL now too?

I wonder if the slow speed can be partially redeemed by having many emulated cores.

No, because in all their wisdom, WebGL never supported compute shaders, Intel has tried multiple times to add it to the standard and now it has been officially dropped for WebGPU.

So when the browsers bother to finally replace their 2011 GPU model by WebGPU (stable), which is still MVP 1.0 compared to Vulkan/Metal/DX 12 Ultimate, then you might have it.

The shader in question isn't a compute shader.

I guess I misunderstood "Compute Shaders in VRChat" then.

It's about using the classic fragment shader (also sometimes referred to as pixel shader) + texture approach as a workaround for compute shaders not being available if the body wasn't clear.

The classical workaround, yeah I missed that, should have read it properly instead of just skimming through.

Thanks for calling me out on that.

It wasn't an oversight/mistake rather an intentional choice for WebGL to support mobile devices with OpenGL ES 2.0 (and later 3.0) which doesn't support compute shaders amongst many other things. Since it was the baseline exposure of GPU capability they wanted it to work universally not just on desktops which were on the way to being the minority of web users. We GPU is getting it because WebGL is already there as a baseline plus it has been nearly a decade and mobile GPUs are more capable.

I know, the problem was never moving past ES 3.0, and now we have to wait yet another 10 years for widespread deployment of WebGPU MVP 1.0, given past history.

So that, alongside the usual blacklisting issues, makes native the only option for anyone that wants to exploit the full potential of the underlying hardware.

I can totally see a “show HN: webapp that turns your GPU into a discount xeon phi” appearing…

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