I'm honestly not sure if that's an attempt at sarcasm or whether you're really serious.
Isn't it just rendering two triangles with a fragment (pixel) shader executing purely on the GPU. I mean, why would that be any slower in a web browser than anywhere else? (Unless the shader compiler is pretty bad?)
Are pure WebGL fragment shader demos really significantly slower in a web browser? If so, why?
Viewed through the lens of someone that lived through PCs requiring programs written in x86 assembly and be the only thing running on the bare metal to achieve anything close to 60FPS for full-screen faux-3D in 320x200 in 256 colors and well.. yes, this is absolutely incredible that a damn web browser can do this stuff in a tab - and it's entirely due to how fast processors (including GPUs) have become.
I'm aware the shader is being throw at the GPU and that's the majority of the complexity, but the GPU is part of the incredible progress consumer hardware has made.
The browser being in the loop just furthers the impressiveness; there's a bunch of other software running on the computer while this is going on in a damn tab.
This[0] is a great book for people who do not know the history of gaming and the struggles devs had in early pc game dev when you had no gpu’s and very crappy graphics cards.
Yes, coming from the days of 6502 8-bit assembly with 64k of memory total for the operating system, the video memory, and whatever was left over for a program to run on the Apple ][+, this IS amazing.
