Do you have any concept of how many gigawatts per day that would waste?
If you want a unit of energy you need power multiplied by time not divided, so “gigawatt days” not “gigawatts per day”.
Try to decode mpeg video at HD resolution in software sometime.
If a website that has no obvious case for using the GPU, but is instead using it to fingerprint, then the user won't experience any slow downs from a software renderer (as it is usually done relatively quickly).
If a website needs the GPU for their videos/graphics, but also incidentally wants to fingerprint you, you're shit out of luck in that case. But this is no worse than what we have current day.
It would still be way less than what large companies are burning on training proprietary LLMs. Do you think the ChatGPT model you use daily was the success at first go? And in that same world, consumers should not even try to protect themselves from GPU fingerprinting?
> The same people who have spent the past 40 years getting confused and worked up about cookies?
Stop with the condescension. It's not about being confused; it's about mitigating genuine privacy concerns. We're not idiots, and dismissing genuine worries won't make the issues disappear.
And most websites most users visit will need the GPU to be remotely usable. For them enabling specific permissions for every website they visit is very inconvenient.
But you can probably also use those to fingerprint, but probably not as precise.
Firefox has only started to ship hardware accelerated video decode a few versions ago. Until very recently, all my video playback was software decoded.