Senior Member
LLVMpipe is good for testing (as reference implementation) and for thouse unlucky folks who do not have GPU capable of given API. They can play with it on CPU then (eg for learning purposes..)
Senior Member
And you have horribly unrealistic assumptions about people having good GPU drivers...
Mozilla stats for Firefox WebGL and layers code that need GPU show only 30% of FF users have up to date, and ok GPU drivers. That is called minority.
(And no wonder. Auto-magical GPU driver update on Windows is nogo..)
Senior Member
Chrome uses DirectX 9 on Windows. The WebGL API is translated via ANGLE to D3D. When it comes to software rasterization, they could port ANGLE and their page/canvas rendering/compositing code to D3D11 (a new but much improved API) and get WARP. It not only is quite fast, it was designed for the debugging and performance testing of apps, making it useful in its own right even if hardware support is available. Chrome has little use for Mesa.Originally Posted by mayankleoboy1
I kinda wish Chrome would better abstract rendering and at least offer a more modern API. Having looked at embedding Chromium (via CEF and similar libraries) into a game for main UI development, I've been turned off by the shoddy performance. chrome still does a lot of CPU-side compositing. Rendering a "page" involes using the GPU for some operations, downloading render target textures to the CPU, doing software ops, handing those over to the host app, which then has to upload back to the GPU, wasting precious GPU bandwidth and forcing graphics pipeline stalls. There's no compelling technical reason why Chrome couldn't hand over a texture reference for a fully GPU-composited page (in D3D9, D3D11, GL, whatever the rendering backend is set to) for the game to use in its own final scene compositing. It also unfortunately requires the multi-process architecture (good for PC, non-starter for consoles) and has no way to set resource limits or a custom memory allocator, which one needs for consoles.
This is one of several reasons why Flash will remain dominant in games for years to come. Libraries like Scaleform provide real host app integration and a wider range of renderers (including for non-D3D, non-GL platforms with very particular requirements) and can be used for real-time interactive HUDs in games. Iggy looks promising, too; I might take a crack at integrating it into our commercial engine next week. I'd really like to see HTML5 take off here, but it's not (yet) feasible. Even the game-oriented Awesomium is limited to being basically a PC-only library due to Chrome's architecture (and license; LGPL WebCore is a problem for some platforms that ban dynamic linking), and still is only something I'd even consider using in screens outside of actual gameplay on a PC-only game. Maybe someday a non-horrible alternative to LibRocket will appear (that lib is severely lacking in features, has no JS support, relies on weird non-standard extensions for things HTML5 can do in a standard way, and was obviously designed by PC developers with no care about resource or memory management, and its pluggable renderer API is not friendly to some platforms requirements; even porting it to GL Core Context was a total bitch, on par with porting AntTweakBar).
These are all areas where in theory FOSS could crush proprietary vendors... but they don't. Just like the sound middlware scene (no, OpenAL is not middleware, it's a low-level sound API that serves as a backend to real middleware like FMOD, Miles, or Wwise on platforms that use it). Likewise for most other interesting game middleware; the only viable options are proprietary solutions or custom rolling (at great expense) your own.
Senior Member
Only if they don't care about windows xp users. Which means you are talking about adding another backend only available to a subset of their users, and increasing the amount of maintenance they have to do and the amount of code running they have to provide security audits on, etc.
Also, they've only chosen to use angle because OpenGL drivers suck on windows. The core browser still has it in OpenGL, so I'm not convinced translating that to D3D just to use a software renderer would be any better than using another software renderer that accepts the native GL commands. Maybe it would be, but you'd have to do some actual testing to show me why, rather than just assuming it must be.
Senior Member
Why care about XP users, the OS is EOL next year...
Senior Member
I'm not sure of Chrome's exact usage statistics, but I wouldn't be surprised if Windows XP usage was still their #1 operating system.
It's got to at least be #2.
And I'm sure it's way, way ahead of the combined Linux and OSX market share.
So would you also be in favor of making a change that is incompatible with Linux and OSX, and dropping support for those OS's? I mean, according to your logic, who cares about those users, right?
Senior Member
#1 is Windows 7, without a doubt. WinXP is probably #2, yes, but in a year the trend is that it will drop below Vista, and far below Windows 8 as well.
Senior Member
The numbers I've seen for overall OS share across all browsers have Win 7 at 45%, and XP at 39%. Vista is under 10%. It's never going to reach XP levels, those people will leave for 7/8 before the last XP users do.
Anyway, I think IE is more popular on the newer windows than it is on the older ones. Probably because XP is still stuck with IE8, and incredibly insecure, and Chrome or Firefox are about the only options to use there.
Even if XP falls to 5% usage next year (and it won't) and the only people using it are those with old machines who just don't want to upgrade, that's still more users than linux has.
It's easy to just say that other people should change their operating system to a newer better supported one. Until it's you that would have to do the changing - then all of sudden it's the software company that has an obligation to support your very valid reasons for choosing the OS that you have.
Senior Member
Logic fail. Linux and OSX are not going EOL (that means "end of line") next year. It's pointless to focus on XP users since the OS will stop being supported next year.
Senior Member
Looks like numbers from last year. I'm seeing Win7 at 52%, WinXP at 24%, Vista at 6%. XP is declining rapidly, Win7 and Vista are declining slowly. But yes, next year there will still be more XP users than Linux users, that's true.
And nope, I'm the one who is maintaining a bunch of PCs for one company, so it's me who is going to do all the changing. That said, one of the PCs there will stay on XP, since it's not connected to the net to begin with, and cannot support anything newer than that anyway. But the others will have to go, there is no reason for them to stay on an EOL OS.
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