News WebGL brings 3D acceleration to browsers

It would just create an even bigger storm of badly coded websites. Right now most websites are seriously suffering from an oversaturation of Flash, now imagine actual 3D animations on every site.

I pity the 56k users.

 

The who?

I still have it at my parent's house... Yes, I can't go to most websites. Remember when you could play TF2 on dial up?

 

i assume forceware and catalyst will support it then. this would force people to buy graphics cards if their websites wont load without it. and ultimatly push prices down i hope. hmmmm 5870 (yes 5870) at 4770 price sounds very appealing

 

It'll push prices up. If there's a higher demand, there's going to be higher prices, I smell the start of a bad day.

 

Here is someone who has clearly never run a profiler on a 3-D app. Why don't you try it sometime. You will find that the app is spending about 90% of its cycles in the 3-D code. Which means that the app itself accounts for only 10% of the CPU utilization. Which means that it can be written in a slow interpreted language and it will have little to no effect on the actual performance of the app.

Algorithms like collision detection that consume CPU cycles can be split out from the application, coded in C, and called from the interpreted language.

This has all been done many times before. It will be very nice to have it in the browser.

 

I can run 3-D stuff with mildly acceptable performance on a 2002 laptop with an ancient Mobility Radeon chip. People with modern nVidia or ATI video cards (the vast majority of users at this point) can have outstanding 3-D experiences with their existing hardware. If you doubt me, go ahead and fire up the Ogre demos on your machine. This is close to the kind of performance you will see with WebGL.

Anyone in this day and age who still thinks that Javascript is slow, is just kidding themselves. Modern javascript engines are using JIT technology just like java. Again, install a browser with one of these engines and try out demos and benchmarks.

Any fool can write bad slow code in any language. A skilled developer will be able to produce excellent effects.

Your video card has immense capabilities for 2-D compositing and image processing that are only available via the 3-D interface. Crack open an OpenGL book and see.

 

You do realize that not everybody has a discrete graphics card, right?
Especially in the laptop market the most common graphics chip is on-board Intel crap.

 

lol yeh.. well what I don't like about it- is let's say everyone and thier grandma decides it's a good idea to use the gpu in their scripts.. like the card I have kicks down into low power mode in 2d and kicks up when needed- It's a good feature.. I could see it getting stuck running balls out all the time for this

I could block it I'm sure, but what about the average joe- who's botnet ready.. actually that should be a standard term- botnet ready.. they should be forced to put it on all pre-builts and it comes with a red rubber stamp so they can stamp it on their forehead they should probably leave this in the hands of plugins like flash

 

Allowing javascript direct access to graphics hardware is not a security risk with graphics hardware the way it works at the moment. The only way I could see that you might find a security flaw is in a shader program but that would be dark black magic indeed.

WebGL for the next few years at least is going to be very very slow - although you get direct access to the opengl functions, doing the number of function calls required to fill the graphics pipeline is a long way off in Javascript at the speed it runs at now.

O3D does some interesting Javascript-specific things to speed up this operation and allows you do create rich 3d applications in Javascript now. You may all cry that we're going to see more irritating spam in our browsers as a result as this, but we're also going to see a quantum leap in the sorts of games that run in browser windows, and potentially some much more immersive websites with pixel shaders generating amazing rollover effects and suchlike.

 

I disagree. Allowing any javascript to run on your PC is a security risk. NoScript is one of the most popular Firefox extensions available. Allowing direct access to the graphics hardware opens up the attack surface even further. Depending upon any bugs in the kernel and/or driver code, this may result in privilege escalation. Furthermore, manufacturers may not have any incentive to fix these faulty binary blobs (eg. IE ActiveX, Adobe Flash) resulting in the creation of "bot-nets on steroids".

 

OMG did you ever tried shaders trough glsl ? One infinite loop, and the only thing to do is pressing the reset button.

 

What is sarcasm?