GPU accelerated 3D in browser: WebGL previews available

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rpg.314

Veteran
WebGL, an effort by khronos to bring 3D to the web is already in a alpha-ish stage. Latest Webkit has basic support for it. You can checkout the videos of gl es 2.0 running in your browser here,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rpKpj6ZO9w

The approach being taken here broadly is to provide 1-to-1 wrappers for gl es2 in javascript.

Personally, I am not too enthused on it since js is a high level language and gl is as close to metal as it can be. (usual gl rants in some other threads please). I would have preferred the approach taken by Google's O3D, where they are providing a high level API. so that work done in js is minimal. I'd have been playing with it if it didn't need it's own shading language. :cry:

At any rate, considering the simplicity of effects shown in the youtube video, I am disappointed at the low frame rates achieved. Let's hope it is one of these

-crappy graphics
-alpha implementation.

BTW, how soon it is before we see ocl running in your browser as well. :LOL:
 
Impossible to know how good the performance is
100fps at 15%cpu on what CPU?
but is this software only? hardware accelerated?
 
I think they used a macbook pro, so should have been a core2.

On a recent macbook pro atleast, they should have glsl running in hw.
 
WebGL Draft spec.

The part I don't understand is why should a webgl implementation refuse to run GLSL 1.2-1.5 code if it can?

Mandating a lower bound of functionality is ok, but why force an upper bound?
 
They probably just don't want things to be too complicated. Providing the ability to run arbitrary shaders from a untrusted source can be dangerous at times.
 
pcchen said:
They probably just don't want things to be too complicated. Providing the ability to run arbitrary shaders from a untrusted source can be dangerous at times.
Click to expand...

My point is not wrt trustworthiness of shaders. Even if I have a source which I trust, I cannot run shaders which use geometry instancing, for example. This thing could have been particularly useful in the context of web-bandwidth savings.

Tesselation would have been right at home in the context of WebGL. It seems it will not be possible to use it anytime soon in your web browser.

It's onething to standardize at a level so that mobile phones can also run 3D. It's another thing to forbid running advanced shaders even on desktops.
 
rpg.314 said:
My point is not wrt trustworthiness of shaders. Even if I have a source which I trust, I cannot run shaders which use geometry instancing, for example. This thing could have been particularly useful in the context of web-bandwidth savings.

Tesselation would have been right at home in the context of WebGL. It seems it will not be possible to use it anytime soon in your web browser.

It's onething to standardize at a level so that mobile phones can also run 3D. It's another thing to forbid running advanced shaders even on desktops.
Click to expand...

Well, they could make it possible to run more advanced shaders if the web site is trusted. However, this could be tricky to design in actual applications because it's sometimes difficult to define "trusted." For example, if you just display a dialog box showing "This web site wants to run an advanced shader, which may pose security threats. Do you want to trust this site?" many users may just hit "Yes" or "Ok" button, and that would simply defeat the purpose.
 
Ressurecting the thread, because the latest Google 9 beta builds now have a pretty much final WebGL implemented, and it seems to run pretty well. Anyone tried it yet? I tried a whole bunch of stuff on Google's showcase site which has a pretty wide range of test applications. Performance doesn't seem amazing, but it is certainly pretty good for in-browser stuff.
 
rpg.314 said:
My point is not wrt trustworthiness of shaders. Even if I have a source which I trust, I cannot run shaders which use geometry instancing, for example. This thing could have been particularly useful in the context of web-bandwidth savings.

Tesselation would have been right at home in the context of WebGL. It seems it will not be possible to use it anytime soon in your web browser.

It's onething to standardize at a level so that mobile phones can also run 3D. It's another thing to forbid running advanced shaders even on desktops.
Click to expand...

its a tough balancing act, especially in a 1.0 product.

eventually, it would be nice to see WebGL adopt something equivalent to the HiDef and Reach profiles XNA Game Studio uses for Windows Phone 7.

that would enable the developer to chose what set of the market to address.

still, if they get the 1.0 version running cross-hardware, cross-platform, cross-browser, so that we can write apps that dont require plugins that run with essentially D3D9 SM 2.0 everywhere - that is a major step forward.

I'd argue that most of the industry targets that level of functionality anyways, since that is the console design target.

and if you dont have art assets specific to D3D10 and beyond, you handicap yourself trying to use those APIs.

unless you are GL already. and even then the market span for what I call the "D3D9 wave" of content is pretty attractive.
 
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