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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Looks impressive! Especially for real-time.

What kind of hardware does it expect, and what's the FPS? (I know that performance may be far from what the architecture allows at this early stage.) What kind of API is it using: DX12? Metal? OpenGL? I did not seem to be able to find it mentioned.

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Thanks! In most of the demo scenes it can get 60+ fps at 900p and 1080p on an Nvidia GTX 1060. That's currently the only hardware I can test it on. On more difficult scenes from the demos I can generally get 30-45 fps.

Its backend only supports OpenGL right now. I think for a long term goal migrating to Vulkan would be a great option since it would unlock MacOS while still allowing Windows and Linux to run it.

Do you think it would be possible to reduce the version requirements to OpenGL 4.3 / OpenGL ES 3.0? Then it might possible to port this engine to WebGL2 and WASM and support all platforms via the browser. Maybe that's a silly idea but I think it would be really cool and perhaps easier than porting to Vulkan :)

You know it actually might be. Three big things it requires are Multi-Draw Indirect (looks to be available in 4.3), shader storage buffers (looks like it's also available in 4.3) and compute shaders which 4.3 should have too.

I don't know much about WebGL2 - do you happen to know if dropping the requirement to GL 4.3 would be enough to make it compatible with WebGL2?

Unfortunately WebGL2 doesn't support multi-draw indirect, shader storage buffers, or compute shaders (there was temporary experimental support for compute shaders but it's considered obsolete now).

Sorry but I seem to have misunderstood the capabilities of WebGL 2. I had read that WebGL 2 was OpenGL ES 3.0 and that “OpenGL 4.3 provides full compatibility with OpenGL ES 3.0”. Which means OpenGL ES 3.0 can run in an OpenGL 4.3 environment. Not the other way around… whoops

The OpenGL versions and variants have always been confusing for me.

WebGL 2 is close to desktop OpenGL 3.3. So probably far too outdated for this project.

Have a look at WenGPU -successor to WebGL. It runs on Vulkan

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/webgpu/

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