Comment by chilmers
Figma uses WebGL for rendering and they seem to be doing ok.
Figma uses WebGL for rendering and they seem to be doing ok.
Yeah, at a level like GDI+, CoreGraphics, XWindows hardware surfaces,....
This isn't really what real-time graphics is all about in modern times.
This is,
https://youtu.be/AV279wThmVU?si=Ou04h5z0Mju7kiJ0
The demo is from 2018, 7 years ago!
The claim was that with WebGL was "the best you can get are shadertoy demos, and product visualisation on ecommerce sites". Figma is neither, regardless of how it's making use of WebGL under the hood. Not sure what relevance an Unreal engine demo is, as you seem to think I was making a claim about real-time graphics that I wasn't.
I had this argument with pjmlp not too long ago, and it goes in circles.
Basically they define anything less than pushing the extreme limits of rendering technology to be worthless, while simultaneously not actually understanding what that is beyond the marketing hype. The fact most users would not be able to run that seven year old demo on their systems today, even natively, would be beside the point of course.
WebGL particularly absolutely has problems, but the revealing thing is how few people state what they really are, such as the API being synchronous or the inability to use inverted z-buffers. Instead it's a lot of noise about ray tracing etc.
WASM per call overhead is a whole other problem too, GC or not.
Figma falls under the graphics requirements of ecommerce sites, I have my doubts that they even make use of WebGL 2.0 features.
It only a way to hopefully get hardware accelerated canvas, if the browser doesn't consider GPU blacklisted for 3D acceleration.
That isn't real time graphics in the sense of games programming.
Although I will say that the difference between my old Intel MacBook and the M2 Pro is night and day.