Also desktop PWAs are IMO underrated and a really good way to distribute a desktop app without having to bundle a whole browser engine with your app. We do this for Construct (www.construct.net) - a complete game development IDE - and I think it's worked out great.
What's the point of saying a UI is GPU-backed (which usually means a UI hand-crafted using mesh, texture atlas, shaders, minimal draw calls, etc.) if it's also grouped together with one of the most bloated and inefficient means to output pixels on the screen (HTML/CSS).
I love the web, not hating at all, but this is comparing apple and oranges.
BTW, the GPU-backed browser UI and GPU-backed OS UI, these come with a bunch of things that someone’s hacked UI doesn’t, namely transparent software fallback when a GPU isn’t available, full compatibility with the UI spec, accessibility support, and tolerance for a wide range of GPUs. People making their own UIs directly almost never do these things (I’m guilty as charged), and as such their UIs are often some combination of more brittle, device dependent, and limited to a narrower audience.
Have you read the article? They specifically mention how nowadays app are just a web page instead of being a GPU-Backed UI.
Trying to push the narrative that HTML / CSS is somehow a GPU-Backed UI is almost comical.
The browser is GPU-accelerated, it is not what anyone in the industry would consider a GPU-Backed UI.
> The browser is GPU-accelerated, it is not what anyone in the industry would consider a GPU-Backed UI.
Now this is a different argument than what you said above. I agree that browsers are what make it GPU-backed, not the HTML/CSS spec per se. But HTML/CSS is becoming effectively a GPU-backed UI in practice, by virtue of the fact that all the browsers use GPUs to render HTML & CSS. This is also true of the UIs provided by Windows and MacOS and Linux - the UI isn’t required to use the GPU, but the OSes will use GPUs for performance when possible. This is all anyone here actually means when they call HTML & CSS a GPU-backed UI.
Is there a meaningful difference once there doesn’t exist a modern browser that doesn’t use a GPU to significantly render web apps?
What I reject is the notion that “GPU-backed” is limited to more than what the words mean literally. If the implementation is using a GPU to render the UI elements, then it’s GPU backed. It doesn’t need to be hand-coded, or a one-off, or using shaders, or guaranteed by the UI spec.
This is exactly what I'm arguing against. We name stuff to represent something. The article very explicitly mention "GPU-Backed UI" as one of the alternative to app that are made with web tech (HTML / CSS). Because it is talking about a very specific way to build UI. And the name they choose is "GPU-Backed UI", which is what anyone would use too.
But you are arguing that a Web Page / Browser / HTML / etc is "GPU Backed UI" and should be group together. But then we have the issue of how we name that type of UI that they are talking in the article which is very obviously something different than what a UI built using a browser would be.
This thread is now hung on a gate-keeping technicality, and has lost the actual point, which is that, regardless of what you want to call it, html & css rendering have been getting faster due to the increasing use of GPUs, which is narrowing the gap between bespoke UIs and interfaces made with more standard toolkits.
Not saying I disagree HTML can be fast, in fact I think it's quite a bit faster than the vast majority of homecooked solutions. But tautological categorization isn't very helpful.
In any case, HTML surely meets the criteria. A much more significant gain is to be had via performance engineering JS than translating it as-stands to rust, wasm, or any other "closer to the GPU" thing. And if comparing two post-optimizations, the HTML/JS will be much easier to debug, style, and make accessible, with practically identical performance.
In fact the flexibility of JS/TS may make the process of discovering a higher performing algorithm/data structure easier, resulting in a faster implementation than had the same amount of effort been dedicated to a worse algorithm in a "faster" language.
Important to note JS can get pretty close to the metal itself with glsl where it matters, while keeping the rest of the app traditional web tech.
To me it rather seems like there are different definitions of what GPU-backed means.
>The browser is GPU-accelerated, it is not what anyone in the industry would consider a GPU-Backed UI.
In which industry?
As a former web dev I would consider any calculation GPU-backed if it is utilizing a GPU.
With that definition and considering html/css is used to build user interfaces, rendering in modern browsers could certainly be called GPU-Backed UI.
If this is a term that already has a different meaning to just the words it is composed of, that's fair to mention. But it doesn't help a discussion to escalate using wording such as "Trying to push the narrative ... is almost comical"
Now people argue that web page are "GPU-Backed UI".
I get the word might be misleading, but the article is talking about a specific way of building UI using the GPU, which does not include web page, so trying to fit the web into that category makes no sense.
In some loose sense every UI is "GPU-Backed", so how do we name that specific way of building UI that the article is mentioning? They choose "GPU-Backed UI" which if anyone would have told me those words I would immediately know what they are talking about and I would've never included HTML/CSS in that category (even if in some broad loose sense of the words it does fit).
Where to draw the line?
As long as the UI or it's underlying engine was built with GPU in mind and not as an after-thought to accelerate it, it can be safe to say it probably fit the "GPU-Backed UI" definition.
If you can easily attach a Shader (https://github.com/emilk/egui/blob/master/examples/custom_3d...), it is also a dead giveaway that it is a "GPU-Backed UI".
WebGL is different from HTML / CSS. You could have a "GPU-Backed UI" running in WebGL.
The fact that Electron apps are GPU backed is indisputable. Whether they are good GPU-Backed UIs is an entirely different question.
Which is very different than saying that it doesn't use the GPU. Virtually every UI solution is "GPU-Backed", but when I hear the term "GPU-Backed UI", I know exactly what type of UI architecture they are talking about.
Not necessarily. I've seen far too many cases where GPU acceleration actually made things "slower." Throughput != latency
There are a couple of talks regarding CSS tricks to force GPU redrawing.
I remember seeing this kind of content on Google IO and WebDev talks.
Would need to also go treasure hunting to find them.
Here is an old article,
https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/gpu-acc...
Browser makers are constantly updating their rendering engines and these pieces of wisdom do go out of date so it's important to verify them every few years.
Mind sharing what you used for backend / frontend of your desktop PWA? I'm planning to work on a similarly complex UI and have been searching around for best-in-class (or best-trade-offs) technologies today
Any books, tips, tutorials, whatever you can share that inspired your architecture decisions would be ___immensely___ appreciated.
Apart from a few extra services on the side, the main app is all static resources so no real backend to speak of. Again, engineered like a traditional desktop app with everything running locally, which also means the UI always responds promptly (no waiting for network) and it all works offline.
Maybe I should write up a blog post about how it all works, but not sure how many people out there want to hear more!