I have a number of GLSL fragment shaders for which I can pretty much guarantee that they conform to #version 120 They use standard, non-ES conformant values and they do not have any ES-specific pragmas.
I really want to make a web previewer for them using WebGL. The previewer won't be used on mobile. Is this feasible? Is the feature set exposed to GLSL shaders in WebGL restricted compared to that GLSL version? Are there precision differences?
I've already tried playing with THREE.js but that doesn't really rub it since it mucks up my shader code before loading it onto the GPU (which I cannot do).
In short: is the GLSL spec sufficient for me to run those shaders?.. because if it isn't what I am after is not doable and I should just drop it.
No, WebGL shaders must be version #100. Anything else is disallowed.
If you're curious why it's because, as much as possible, WebGL needs to run everywhere. If you could choose any version your web page would only run on systems with GPUs/Drivers that handled that version.
The next version of WebGL will raise the version number. It will allow GLSL ES 3.0 (note the ES). It's currently available behind a flag in Chrome and Firefox as of May 2016
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I've been surprised to find out that my Android phone does not support OES_texture_float extension, but fully supports WebGL2, which has floating texture functionality as baseline. What could cause the lack of their support in WebGL1, and is there any way around it, besides emulating float textures in shaders or migrating everything to WebGL2 (which would require a massive rewrite of everything to support both options)?
Edit: it seems the answer to WebGL: Declining support for OES_texture_float on Android covers part of this question, though it seems strange that they expect us to move to WebGL2 which requires a lot of work to maintain backwards compatibility.
Now that a Vulkan to Metal wrapper is officially supported by Khronos (MoltenVK), and that OpenGL to Vulkan wrappers began to appear (glo), would it be technically possible to use OpenGL ES 3.1 or even 3.2 (so even with support to OpenGL compute shaders) on modern iOS versions/HW by chaining these two technologies? Has anybody tried this combination?
I'm not much interested in the performance drop (that would obviously be there due to the two additional layers of abstraction), but only on the enabling factor and cross-platform aspect of the solution.
In theory, yes :).
MoltenVK doesn't support every bit of Vulkan (see the Vulkan Portable Subset section), and some of those features might be required by OpenGL ES 3.1. Triangle fans are an obvious one, full texture swizzle is another. MoltenVK has focused on things that could translate directly; if the ES-on-Vulkan translator was willing to accept extra overhead, it could fake some or all of these features.
The core ANGLE team is working on both OpenGL ES 3.1 support and a Vulkan backend, according to their README and recent commits. They have a history of emulating features (like triangle fans) needed by ES that weren't available in D3D.
AFAIK is the compute shader model very limited in WebGL. The documentation on this is even less. I have a hard time to find any answers to my questions.
Is there a possibility to execute a compute shader on one or multiple VBO/UBO's and alter their values?
Update: On April 9 2019, the Khronos group released the a draft standard for compute shaders in WebGL 2.
Original answer:
In this press release, the Khronos group stated that they are working on an extension to WebGL 2 to allow for compute shaders:
What’s next? An extension to WebGL 2.0 providing compute shader support is under development, which will bring many leading-edge graphics algorithms to the web. Khronos is also beginning work on the next generation of WebGL, to bring the enhanced performance of the new generation of explicit 3D APIs to the web. Stay tuned for more news!
Your best bet is to wait about a year or two for it to happen on a limited number of GPU + browser combination.
2022 UPDATE
It has been declared here (in red) that the WebGL 2.0 Compute specification has instead been moved into the new WebGPU spec and is deprecated for WebGL 2.0.
WebGPU has nowhere near global coverage across browsers yet, whereas WebGL 2.0 reached global coverage as of Feb 2022. WebGL 2.0 Compute is implemented only in Google Chrome (Windows, Linux) and Microsoft Edge Insider Channels and will not be implemented elsewhere.
This is obviously a severe limitation for those wanting compute capability on the web. But it is still possible to do informal compute using other methods, such as using regular graphics shaders + the expanded input and output buffer functionalities supplied by WebGL 2.0.
I would recommend Amanda Ghassaei's gpu-io for this. It does all the work for you in wrapping regular GL calls to give compute capability that "just works" (in either WebGL or WebGL 2.0).
I'm thinking about releasing a bunch of GPGPU functions as a framework using OpenGL ES 2.0 for iOS devices.
When capturing an OpenGL ES frame in XCode, I can see the code of the shaders being used. Is there a way to avoid this from happening? I've tried deleting and detaching the shaders with glDeleteShader and glDetachShader after linking the OpenGL ES program, but the code is still captured.
I'm not looking for a bullet proof option (which probably doesn't exist), just something that makes getting to the code a bit more difficult than just pressing a button.
Thank you.
The debugger has to capture input from calls to glShaderSource, the actual shader source is never stored in VRAM after compilation. I cannot think of any way to overcome this problem directly. Calling glShaderSourceis required because OpenGL ES does not support precompiled shader binaries.
I would recommend obfuscating the original shader code, perhaps using compile time macros, or even a script to scramble variable names etc (be carful of attribs and uniforms as they affect linkage to app code).
Here is a tool used for obfuscation/minimization of shader code. I believe it is built for WebGL so it may not work perfectly. http://glslunit.appspot.com/compiler.html
I want to use some of the features of OpenGL 4 (specifically, tessellation shaders and newer shader language versions) from WebGL. Is this possible, in either a standards-compliant or a hackish way? Is there some magic value I could use instead of, say, gl.FRAGMENT_SHADER to tell the underlying GL implementation to compile tessellation shaders?
WebGL is based on the OpenGL ES 2.0 Specification so you wouldn't be able to use GL4 unless the browser also somehow exposes a GL4 interface to JavaScript which i doubt. Even if a browser would give you such an interface it would only work on that browser.