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Comment by eta_carinae | Hacker News Reader

Nice, but it seems to busy wait: my CPU is pegged at 50% even when I am not doing anything.

So, just like Minecraft. :-D

Last I looked, the vector math part of 3D wasn't handled by webGL, this uses Three.js to handle that, and looks to be the main bottleneck. Until you can do matrix/vector math using hardware, webGL is pretty much useless.

> Until you can do matrix/vector math using hardware, webGL is pretty much useless.

Modern matrix libraries like glMatrix

https://github.com/toji/gl-matrix

use typed arrays effectively to do very fast matrix and vector math in JS. A modern JS engine can transform such code into something very efficient, more than fast enough to do things like even first person shooters.

That is pretty much about right. I wrote a bit about the implementation[1], and the discussion went over how to optimize this (including, but not limited to, using shaders to do the drawing and not relying on Three.js so much).

[1] http://metaphysicaldeveloper.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/implem...

Would be interested if its worthwhile/possible using shaders as a wrapper for three.js. All I got when I was searching was there was a mozilla bug report and a hacked patch to expose SIMD through js[1], and a project to add SIMD support to vectors in Dart[2].

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=644389

[2] http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/06/18/bringing-simd-accel...

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