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On 13-06-21 01:53 PM, Gregg Tavares
wrote:
That, however, only applies if real-world applications that one would want to port, are already using OpenGL share groups. Are they? Here is what I am not in a rush to start implementing WEBGL_shared_resources: I have never heard of applications actually using share groups, at least not in ways that fundamentally require them as opposed to more fine-grained sharing mechanisms. Most of the time, what applications want to share across context is only a small minority of their OpenGL objects, and specifically a minority of their *textures*. For that, there exists a variety of existing mechanisms to allow sharing textures, which is also what browsers have to rely on anyways to composite WebGL frames in a GPU-accelerated browser compositor. The value of focusing specifically on sharing only specific textures on a per-object opt-in basis, as opposed to sharing everything (as OpenGL share groups do) is that there are subtle performance caveats associated with OpenGL object sharing. In particular, having two OpenGL contexts in the same share group simultaneously current on two different threads is known to be a severe performance issue, as it requires certain drivers to turn on inefficient locking mechanisms. For that reason, I expect that WEBGL_shared_resources is on a head-on collision course with other WebGL features that we're likely to implement in the near future, like WebGL-on-Web-Workers. If I have to choose one --- I care far, far more for WebGL-on-Web-Workers than I do for WEBGL_shared_resources. It also seems that the majority of WEBGL_shared_resources use cases can be addressed by other means (e.g. targeting a single WebGL context to render to multiple canvases, as has been discussed). Even if there was a strong need for OpenGL-like sharing of objects, I expect it'd still be mostly for sharing *textures* in which case we could make a spec allowing only to share textures with semantics that map well onto efficient texture-sharing mechanisms. But again, we haven't seen a lot of evidence for even that. Cheers, Benoit
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