Hacker News Reader

Comment by camdroidw | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little out of the loop these days but I thought webgpu obviated the use of platform specific language (say Cuda)?

WebGPU is a API that sits above Vulkan, DirectX and Metal. For CUDA, ROCm and oneAPI there is SYCL. But it's not used too much and it seems mostly just Intel is invested.

Additionally, designed for 2015 hardware capabilities, with JavaScript in mind, in a sandboxed environment.

Some folks are reaching out to WebGPU outside the browser, because Vulkan is a pain to program for, and they misuse WebGPU as middleware, although a less capable one, due to its original design, and who is driving its standardisation process.

Regarding SYCL, Intel basically bought the only company that was shipping a good developer experience for it, CodePlay, which used to do specialized compilers for game consoles, and pivoted into GPGPU.

There are a lot of hardware features inaccessible from webgpu because its devs still have a lot of work to do for the current implementations—no browser is even shipping it on Linux by default.

Vulkan is closer, but CUDA still exposes more features.

Not quite right, Chrome is shipping with support on ChromeOS, Android and WebOS.

It is GNU/Linux that Google/Chrome sees as low priority.

WebGPU is the lowest common denominator over ancient mobile phones and modern hardware; as well as Vulkan, DirectX and Metal; effectively making it an ancient-mobile-phone-graphics-API. It is at the time of its releas as outdated as WebGL was when it came out.

Additionally Chrome sabotaged the WebGL 2.0 compute effort in name of WebGPU, which 5 years later still isn't fully available.

However despite all of this, there is hardly any Web 3D experience, or game, at the level of iPhone games from its OpenGL ES 3.0 glory days, like Infinity Blade, from 2011!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com