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Comment by spxneo | Hacker News Reader

but somebody told me a while back on here that WebGPU was outdated? whats the consensus ?

You may be thinking of WebGL. My understanding is that WebGPU is effectively supposed to supersede WebGL.

WebGPU is most definitely not outdated. It's a unified interface for all things floating point. From the datacenter to the watch on your wrist. However, most folks not deep into the inner workings will ever touch it. What it does do is close the door on the App Store model. Apple already knows this, which is why we have the AVP.

Now that persistent filesystem permissions have landed the domain of apps that really need to be native desktop apps is narrower than ever:

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/persistent-permissions-for...

Why would wGPU be outdated if it was in the middle of being supported for browsers?

this is what I want to know but someone said it was not suitable for running GPU powered games on here i will see if i can dig up the thread

Depends on how much GB you want to force into users browsers, plan to work around browser blacklists and deep variation in API support, and protect the game code.

There is a reason why in 2024, there is yet to exist a WebGL 2.0 game that can match Infinity Blade from 2011, the game used by Apple to demo iPhone's OpenGL ES 3.0 capabilities.

WebGPU on top of that, is Chrome only for the time being, still years away from a sound 1.0 release on Safari and Firefox.

It sounds like that someone is really just "someone". And people online have lots of opinions. Not all worth reading.

But that someone probably just said, that with WebGPU you do not get the power you would have with a native feature set and this is true. So we likely won't see AAA games anytime soon in the browser. But it is definitely suitable for games in general.

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