Re: [Public WebGL] Ambiguity and Non-deterministicness in the WebGL Spec

[Vladimir Vukicevic <vladimir@mozilla.com>]

> So I don't see a heck of a lot of point in doing something potentially
> costly to performance for the sake of determinism - when poorly tested
> apps are going to fail in large numbers anyway. It's no different than
> when someone writes some HTML that only works on Internet Explorer.

Compared to many other things that are going on, the potential extra clear should be extremely cheap, though.

> My only concern is that if the system clears to some default color and I
> have to clear the screen again to get it to be the color I want. That's
> nasty and wasteful-by-design. If we could only agree that the system
> forcably clears the screen to the application-specified
> color/depth/stencil settings while ignoring the
> colorMask/depthMask/scissor setting - then there shouldn't be any
> great problems with that.

The intent actually is to optimize away the clear if the author does one -- so applications that already do a clear should see no impact.  The only issue arises is if an application wants to draw a screen-size quad to set up a background or something; those apps will see an unnecessary clear.  I think the cost of the clear will be extremely minor -- on mobile, tiled architectures are very efficient in doing a clear, and desktop hardware has plenty of bandwidth to spare to do an extra clear here.

I'm with Tim and Ken here -- I'd rather remove as many "undefined" bits as we can, without severely impacting performance or functionality.  This seems like an easy place to do so.

    - Vlad
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