Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] WebGPU and WGSL (#626)

Apologies for the delay. The review itself is complete on our end, but got delayed due to other internal discussions. The TL:DR; summary is that while we have not been able to deeply investigate the detailed utility/risks due to the size of the spec, the overall impression is that we think this work shows a lot of promise and is a definite improvement over the status quo (WebGL).

Here are some comments that came up during the review:

- Should there be a higher granularity for selecting devices? For example, for cases where one wants to select a high-VRAM device (e.g. for machine learning workloads) or the non-dominant (e.g. secondary device which hopefully will not jank the current compositor) device. Allowing a single application to be the dominant resource user is not new, but it is definitely something that want to be careful about.
- Power consumption is a concern. While there is a mechanism to allow applications to request a high power vs low power device, we are wondering if the choice should be initiated by the user, and not the application. e.g. if the user is on the go, let them choose integrated GPU instead of discrete to save power. Initially, we discussed the possibility of forcing the application to integrated in low-power scenarios, but adds another fingerprinting surface so we don't think this is a valid suggestion.
- It might be useful to have a note suggesting implementations should surface a warning about power usage at some point, given that this would be permission free.
- We have since revisited our position on permissions [based on this data](https://developer.chrome.com/blog/permissions-chip/). Based on some informal asking around non-technical folks, the terms "graphics" is too generic and users will likely be confused - e.g. “yes, I guess the website needs graphics” when it is actually trying to mine Ethereum. For these reasons, gating behind a permission might not be adequate; but it might be useful to add a note (implementation detail) which allows users to revoke access (or kill it) if an application is hogging the GPU. (this would be analogous to the "this tab is hanging" dialog)
- Re: [USVString vs DOMString](https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/784) - we are happy with the group's conclusion.

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Received on Monday, 23 May 2022 02:22:37 UTC