Sure. WebGL is a sandboxed subset of OpenGL ES 2.0, and WebGL 2 is similarly a derivative of OpenGL ES 3.0.
While both of those APIs offer nearly full programmability, they do so with an API structure that retains a ton of legacy cruft from the days of fixed-function pipelines. Neither are low-level graphics APIs; many assumptions are made. This makes doing general purpose compute tasks on WebGL extremely hacky at best.
Think of WebGPU as Vulkan or Metal for the web. Lower level with much more work, but ultimately cleaner with superior performance and capability.
Sure. WebGL is a sandboxed subset of OpenGL ES 2.0, and WebGL 2 is similarly a derivative of OpenGL ES 3.0.
While both of those APIs offer nearly full programmability, they do so with an API structure that retains a ton of legacy cruft from the days of fixed-function pipelines. Neither are low-level graphics APIs; many assumptions are made. This makes doing general purpose compute tasks on WebGL extremely hacky at best.
Think of WebGPU as Vulkan or Metal for the web. Lower level with much more work, but ultimately cleaner with superior performance and capability.
ELI7: WebGL crunches numbers fast to end up as pixels, WebGPU crunches numbers fast to end up as numbers again.
Got it, thanks for the clear explanation.
So this means that we'll soon have web ads mining bitcoins using our GPUs, right? :)
That was already a thing, for a while. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9042.0
Can't tell if they are "honest" people who closed shop when they realized how bad their idea was, or if they just threw smoke and went dark.
Well, that's one thing. Google "Large Scale Distributed Deep Networks" for another.
Already happening! This came up a few days ago: Tensorflow implemented with webgl: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14894653