... when the GPU drivers fix their bugs, when all the undefined behaviour gets defined, when the security holes get patched, and triple-A gaming studios with intimate connections to the vendors aren't the only ones driving the tech. Any day now.
WebGL devs are playing the longest game of chicken seen on the web yet.
Runs OK on my Surface Pro 2. Core i5, Intel GMA, 4GB of shared RAM.
There were some places where the framerate dropped but they were the more complex demos. The fan kicked in almost immediately though. In general, even if the framerate was low it was stable.
Interestingly IE11 seemed to render almost as well as Chrome and I didn't notice a speed difference. I guess that's what happens if you offload work to the GPU.
I viewed this whole presentation on a MacBook Air plugged into a 32" monitor, and while 1 or 2 of the slides would pause here and there, overall it was amazingly smooth. Mind blown.
We've come a long way from cheesing a little extra performance out of the DOM by applying CSS 3D transforms, that's for sure ;)
This is still emerging tech but it's stabilizing rapidly — both Firefox and Chrome play back at 60fps on a MacBook Air. On a sub-$1K laptop it's noticeably slower because things are disabled due to Intel HD 3000 driver bugs but those bugs are now getting a lot more attention since they're so visible. I'd expect the situation to be a lot more viable in a year or two, so now seems to be a good time to start learning the technology and thinking about how to use it.
I was expecting another disappointment but no, on this somewhat dated system it runs great, and I was really impressed with several of the demos, even manipulating/rotating them in real time with the mouse, all running quite smoothly: Chromium Version 36.0.1985.125 Ubuntu 14.04 (283153), i5 2.8 Ghz, 6 Gb RAM
Take a look at chrome://gpu in Chrome. It should tell you a bit about your GPU is capable of.
I have your exact hardware configuration and all his slides got a solid 60FPS. I'm curious what your setup was. What version of Firefox? What version of Windows? Latest NVidia drivers? Any weird extensions installed, screen/desktop capture apps running?
Not really great specs.. works great on my lappy(4GB RAM, i5, Radeon HD 7670M)
On my macbook pro (2011), things were much smoother in FF31 than Canary. The complex stuff did show some stutter though.
On my Radeon 6850, under FF, everything is super smooth. Intel i7 quad-core.
I really want to get behind WebGL, but when is it going to have decent performance/compatibility? I tried this out in both FF and Chrome on a powerful desktop computer (i5-4670K, GTX760, 16GB RAM) and it was glitchy/stuttery as described. Firefox rendered some scenes at what seemed like 2-3 FPS. Chrome was much smoother, but I couldn't tell what parts were glitches. For example, the "classic demoscene water effect" looked completely different in Chrome. But neither FF nor Chrome produced an effect remotely resembling water.
Although this looks like a great library, personally I prefer to stick with OpenGL programming until WebGL's quircks are sorted out.