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Comment by abe_m | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, what native resources are needed? It seems Solidworks mainly needs access to the file system, GPU, and perhaps networking. GPU and networking in the browser, and the file handling could be implemented over the network instead of locally.

For most current pro CAD, certainly there are a lot of calls to Win32 libraries on Windows, but those aren't fundamentally needed by a CAD system. There was professional 3D CAD before Windows.

I don't know what native hardware would be needed that isn't already accessible through current Chrome?

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There is the full power of CUDA kernels, for starters. Then there's a lot of potential low level optimizations that browsers don't enable that can easily make a 2x to 10x performance difference. Also, there is no good way to give hard bounds on memory usage.

CUDA kernels are a non starter because they require Nvidia GPUs. Things like CAD software will mostly use some kind of lower common denominator graphics layer like openGL. Webgpu is actually a decent alternative to that.

There certainly are optimisations that aren’t possible in web browsers today. Arbitrary wasm memory constraints and difficulties around cpu multithreading or simd for example. But CUDA kernels aren’t a realistic option for most cad software.

Ansys runs on CUDA. That the reality of your "non-starter".

I think the use of CUDA is niche in the CAD world, probably constrained to a sub-set of FEA. We dropped 6 figures on an Abaqus system -> new hardware, new software within the last couple of years, and a lot of the analysis still runs on the CPU, with a bit of off load to the GPU.

On the performance end, the is a wide range of CAD that was done on systems more than 10x slower, so that also may not be a deal-breaker. For the simpler end of professional CAD operation, I haven't noticed any performance gain from a 2nd get Core i7 to a 10th gen. On the high-complexity end, there is some benefit for some operations, but certainly there is a wide scope of application that could be fine with only 10% of peak performance on newer work stations.

Browsers do offer a file system now, too.

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