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Which... is pretty much how GPGPU started in the early 2000. Sad/funny how we go through this cycle again.

It will be interesting to see if the industry will produce a standard for GPGPU in the browser. Giving that the desktop standard is less common than a proprietary standard.

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This is still done in pretty much every game engine I've worked with (for general computation used to support rendering as much as the rendering itself). It's frankly extremely practical and better than many GPGPU apis because it matches what the hardware is doing internally better (GPU core warps, texel caches, vertex caches, etc).

> It will be interesting to see if the industry will produce a standard for GPGPU in the browser.

They did: webcl Sadly, it had multiple security issues so the browsers that had implemented it in their beta channels (just Chrome and Firefox, I believe) ended up removing it. And now, I think it's totally stalled and no one is planning on implementing it.

Also sadly, SIMD.js support is coming along extremely slowly.

WebGPU conversations are ongoing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGPU

WebAssembly is coming along quite nicely.

And SwiftShader is a quite nice fallback for blacklisted GPUs. They simulate WebGL on the CPU and take advantage of SIMD: https://github.com/google/swiftshader

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