Re:WebGPU Shading Language
by jacobolus on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @08:00AM
(#22545025)
That’s maybe true for current 3D graphics heavy projects, but is not necessarily true for any arbitrary future use of GPU compute.
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GPUs are machines for crunching data, be it graphics or NNs. I can't think of many use case where that isn't true.
Also if you anticipate the GPU being used as an accelerator, that is all the more reason to use a text based format because it allows for easy code generation.
Re:WebGPU Shading Language
by jfkebwjsbx on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @01:34PM
(#22547914)
You are wrong. Many projects use GPUs without big datasets. See ShaderToy, for instance: a lot of computation, almost no input data. Many other games, too: they may use the GPU for rendering fast yet have say 50 MiB of textures and assets only.
If you think of AAA games, ML and whatnot, of course. But I doubt anybody will use WebGPU for those, to be honest.
50MB of textures is a lot compared to shader source code size, which will be in the kilobytes for such a small project.
The same with shadertoy, the storage or transmission of a shadertoy shader is never going to be significant compared to all the assets on the page.
The contention was that a binary representation is necessary to save space for storage or transmission. It just isn't.