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Comment by blauditore | Hacker News Reader

Note this is not about WebGL, but about WebGPU by Apple, claiming it "generally offers better performance" than OpenGL/WebGL.

I'm not an expert in this area, but isn't it a bad idea to introduce another standard if there's already WebGL with great cross-browser and -platform support? It reminds me of what people have been raging about towards Microsoft for years...

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Apple's WebGPU is just one of 3 proposals (from Mozilla, Google and Apple) of what the WebGL successor will look like. WebGPU is (more or less) a mapping of the Metal 3D API to the web, but the final standard API will have to be a common subset of Vulkan, D3D12 and Metal with a common shading language.

The WebGL programming model has a lot of shortcoming from a modern point of view, see here: http://floooh.github.io/2016/08/13/webgl-next.html (you can mostly ignore my criticism of adopting Vulkan for the web, the Mozilla proposal (called Obsidian) is pretty close to Vulkan, and doesn't look as bad as I feared when I wrote that blog post).

> a common subset of Vulkan, D3D12 and Metal with a common shading language.

So, Vulkan? This is literally what Vulkan exists for, and does – a shading language and API implemented by all vendors.

In a perfect world yes, but Apple doesn't support Vulkan and probably never will. Microsoft doesn't support Vulkan in UWP apps either.

Vulkan being a universal 3D API is a myth - it only exists on Windows (as a second class citizen), Linux, Android, and the Nintendo Switch.

Well, then Apple users will just see what a Firefox user sees today when they visit Google Earth: Your Browser is not supported.

This isn’t an issue – there’s more people using Firefox, or even more unusual browsers, which can’t use half the web, than there are people using Apple devices.

> [...] there’s more people using Firefox, or even more unusual browsers, which can’t use half the web, than there are people using Apple devices.

Highly unlikely.

In Germany, Apple has a sub-16% mobile marketshare, and even less on desktop. Firefox has 43% marketshare.

Google frequently releases major products without Firefox support, with this only being added months or years later.

This is reality today.

Germany != the World.

Besides, market share of iOS in Germany is ~32% [1], and Firefox ~17% [2], according to stat counter.

And even those numbers are lower/higher(respectively) than those of countries like USA, UK, Australia, Japan etc...

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/germany

[2] http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/germany

Congratulations, you counted mobile usage, not desktop usage.

I mentioned a 43% desktop ussge for Firefox.

And on Switch, Nintendo also has their own API, in a similar vein to Sony when they toyed with OpenGL ES 1.0 support.

Yeah, but I read somewhere that Apple dislikes Vulkan and will never support it on their platforms. After all, they have a competing API, Metal

Edit: Source: Hacker News comment a while ago by a person who talked to the team at WWDC

Unfortunately for Apple, there's even more people outside of Apple who just wish Metal would die.

Only on HN.

All major graphics middleware and image manipulation applications, are already Metal aware.

I have never heard anyone who has used Vulkan actually advocate for it. But I have heard a lot of good things from Graphics Developers on Metal.

This isn't to say Vulkan is bad, everyone seems to be saying "In Vulkan, You really needs to know what you are doing".

Metal the API has some elegance in it, but the target range of hardware is controllable and way more limited than what Vulkan was designed for. Apple can choose what graphics goes into their Macs and iPhones, collaborate with the mobile GPU provider, etc.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=metal%20wwdc&sort=byDate&type=... -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15734680

>acoye: I see a couple of issues with the Mac / TF OpenCL situation. Apple is pushing metal and performance shaders, I would not bet on strong support from them keeping up to date drivers with performant ocl. I asked at wwdc17 about vulkan and they clearly do not want it on their platform.

Vulkan is only available on Win32, Linux and Android though. The reality is that there is no standard low-level 3D-API. I don't see this as a problem though, the complexity of Vulkan shows that it is very hard to create a one-size-fits-all 3D API, competition is good and Metal shows that it is possible to create a balanced 3D-API which combines modern features with ease of use.

Regarding Windows, Vulkan is only available on the desktop.

UWP only allows for DirectX.

And it is an optional 3D API on Android, starting with version 7.0. Which makes it pretty useless when targeting the majority of Android market, given the whole upgrade story.

This is solvable, to an extend, on the user side via a software layer ([1]).

[1] https://www.khronos.org/blog/khronos-announces-the-vulkan-po...

It's being introduced for the same reason it was on desktop, increased performance, more GPU features, avoidance of poor driver implementation, and more optimal usage of the underlying hardware.

See https://gpuweb.github.io/admin/cg-charter.html

This is like the web variant of Vulcan/Metal/etc, isn't it? Lower level API than GL.

If it maps closely enough to Vulkan, it's good (and it seems it will be the case according to the other comment). It's not the only competing successor of WebGL.

Apple's prototype is basically WebMetal, and the question about how well it maps to Vulkan is still open. Like, surely, there are hoops you've got to solve (w.r.t memory types, pipeline barriers, etc), but it's not clear how much actual real-world performance is going to be lost on this emulation.

Same goes to the other direction (mapping from Obsidian/WebVulkan to Metal), with a caveat that Vulkan requires more state to be communicated, so it's easier to ignore some of the user input (if it doesn't make sense on Metal) than to figure out the missing bits.

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