Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisweekly | Hacker News Reader

"error: WebGPU not supported"

iOS 17.1.2, iPhone 13 pro. no option to try cpu instead, just the error message.

Yeah WebGPU doesn't work on mobile for the moment. https://caniuse.com/webgpu Also the simulation can be done on CPU, but the rendering in always done in WebGPU, so you need it anyways

I thought Apple came up w/ WebGPU, and also that it had worked on iPhones in the past..? Maybe I misremembered. Caniuse shows it as red /unsupported in iOS, and further searching led me to this huge list of webgl bugs in webkit: https://bugs.webkit.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=__open__&comp...

Apple made a proposal for WebGPU that was kind of WebMetal with a dialect of HLSL. The final WebGPU standard has little in common and is not supported by Safari yet. My belief is that a big part of Apple's reason for proposing a new standard at all was to force a venue change to W3C instead of Khronos, due to legal disputes they had (maybe still have?) with Nvidia.

Apple also created the OpenCL standard; they love nothing more than setting up cross vendor standards to fail. I absolutely hate them for that one in particular.

Actually the blame lies on Khronos side, alongside Google, Intel and AMD ineptude to do anything of value with OpenCL.

For a very long time Apple's platforms were the only ones with a proper OpenCL support, until they gave up and went their own merry way, without Khronos politics.

> For a very long time Apple's platforms were the only ones with a proper OpenCL support

I'm curious about this, since I never had a problem with OpenCL on Intel, AMD, Nvidia and am pretty sure I did with Apple in the beginning. Shipping two commercial OpenCL apps since 2010 (and they still work excellently on all of them).

Well how did you enjoy their version of NVIDIA Nsight for GPGPU debugging?

Yeah, it was mostly printf debugging, I imagine.

The drivers apparently not always that good, specially in regards to OpenCL 2.x.

Then there was zero support on Android, with Google pushing Renderscript instead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com