WebGPU Unleashed

Learning and science

programming e-book

SHOW HN2024

471points
73comments
#76of 3,515 in 2024
Top 3%of 2024 by points

How HN took it

LovedMost comments that take a side are positive

11 positive, 0 neutral or asking, 3 mixed, 0 critical, out of 14 comments about the project. Thread score +0.65.

Idea: 3 for, 0 againstDocs: 2 for, 0 againstDesign: 2 for, 0 againstExecution: 1 for, 0 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Well-polished, in-depth and easy-to-understand content.

    From 3 comments
    • A rare gem of a book! I've tried using many books to get started with GPUs, but I always ended up giving up quickly. This book is the most in-depth yet easy-to-understand one…
      Confirm2754 on HN
    • This is very well polished! Obviously took a lot of hard work and it shows in the results. Well done! Question: I see the that the code for the examples can be pulled from…
      kallistisoft on HN
    • This looks fantastic. Just the notion of a hyperlinked code-playground is fantastic. Not to mention the content of the book. And a side project at that? Wow. Congratulations and…
      sramam on HN
  • Interactive code playground is a great idea.

    From 2 comments
    • This looks fantastic. Just the notion of a hyperlinked code-playground is fantastic. Not to mention the content of the book. And a side project at that? Wow. Congratulations and…
      sramam on HN
    • This is awesome! I’ve given up learning graphics programming in the past due to the fragmented ecosystem of libraries. It just felt overwhelming. This seems exactly what I’ve…
      pedrolins on HN

Objections

  • Mobile layout and scrolling are awkward.

    From 2 comments
    • Great book, thanks for writing it. Just a low hanging issue. The rendering on mobile viewport especially on Firefox is not ideal. Navigation is broke and content does not scroll…
      ssahoo on HN
    • This looks great. I can't wait to dive in. Thank you very much for sharing. Formatting nitpick for the site: when viewed on mobile, the text width is set to screen width minus 1…
      MalcolmDwyer on HN
  • WebGPU performance is questioned by some commenters.

    From 2 comments
    • WebGPU burned me out too when the Firefox developers got let go. WebGPU is super slow on GPU and all the official benchmarks only care about CPU performance.
      koolala on HN
    • > WebGPU is super slow on GPU and all the official benchmarks only care about CPU performance. omg I thought I was the only one that found that. I tried webgpu (On a native…
      FragmentShader on HN

Requests

  • Offline download of the book text.

    From 1 comment
    • This is very well polished! Obviously took a lot of hard work and it shows in the results. Well done! Question: I see the that the code for the examples can be pulled from…
      kallistisoft on HN
  • Playground shows book contents alongside code.

    From 1 comment
    • This is super impressive and really exciting as I am looking to get deeper into WebGPU. Two quick notes on the playground before I dive into the content soon: 1. The playground…
      dylanhu on HN

Questions

  • Why WebGPU is still not enabled by default in Firefox.

    From 1 comment
    • What's the story with WebGPU in Firefox? Why is it still not enabled by default?
      shmerl on HN
  • Whether WebGPU can replace CUDA for GPU compute.

    From 1 comment
    • Many of us are non-graphics programmers interested in learning to benefit from CUDA-style parallelization. I’ve read they’re mostly incompatible, though. I know there’s vendors…
      nickpsecurity on HN

Alternatives named

  • WebGL

    From 1 comment
    • We investigated this many years ago: https://github.com/BabylonJS/Babylon.js/ 1. It works just fine for basic 3D functionality, but has limited support for tricks like fog FX…
      Joel_Mckay on HN
  • CUDA

    From 1 comment
    • Many of us are non-graphics programmers interested in learning to benefit from CUDA-style parallelization. I’ve read they’re mostly incompatible, though. I know there’s vendors…
      nickpsecurity on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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