Does this hold water?

[ChinRey]

I stumbled across this little WebGL demo:

http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/

To really rub it in, this isn't current cutting edge shading technology. It dates back at least to August 2011 so it's based on the same version of GLSL as Second Life (or possibly even an earlier one).

I know it isn't fair to compare a single feature demo to a complex 3D environment. But even so, I can't help thinking: Can we have something like that in SL and Sansar, please?

Edited May 13, 2018 by ChinRey

[Fionalein]

Maybe we should file a feature request...

[Kyrah Abattoir]

It's very nice, but as with all those features it is presented on its own, in an existencial "vacuum". The problem is typically when you try to integrate those within a complex environment that needs processing power for "other things".

[animats]

I love that demo, and I've seen it before. The compute load is large. It's using 85% of one reasonably good CPU just for that bit of water and its light deflection.

A few more years of GPU development and that will be available on affordable graphics cards.

[ChinRey]

9 hours ago, animats said:

It's using 85% of one reasonably good CPU just for that bit of water and its light deflection.

I think that's an exaggeration. I got 59% with no ripples and 62% with as much ripples as I could manage to generate and the ball bopping up and down. My gpu is just a four year old Radeon R7 240 so it's hardly a powerhouse.

 

9 hours ago, animats said:

A few more years of GPU development and that will be available on affordable graphics cards.

Yes, it's probably too early to integrate effects as fancy as that to a virtual scene but we can't dream, can't we?

That being said, I think it's worth noticing that the water ripples don't seem to affect the load very much, it's almost enitrely "overhead" from the base static scene. And this demo was launched in August 2011, the same month as OpenGL 4.2 (the version SL still uses today). OpenGL has had several big updates to its shaders since then and it's still worst in class. Vulkan and, probably, Metal can run circles around it and even old DirectX seems to is supposed to handle shaders significantly better than OpenGL. Perhaps even more important, one engine, Unigine, was able to produce water ripples remarkably similar to these within a fairly complex 3D scene as early as 2008.

Edit: after I wrote this post, I did a direct OpenGL/DirectX comparasion using the 2008 Unigine Benchmark. I couldn't detect any difference in performance between them so perhaps so perhaps the to are tied for the last place in the Graphics API race.

Edited May 14, 2018 by ChinRey

[Madelaine McMasters]

With that web page sitting idle (no ripples), my Vega 56 graphics system reports about 10% utilization. When I scribble all over the surface, that rises to 15% or so. If I close the page, usage goes to zero. SL itself consumes about 40% of my GPU while I'm standing still in a typical sim, running at 60fps. Chin, as you've said Metal and Vulkan can run circles around OpenGL. Any resistance to implementing something like this in SL is probably more a matter of development effort than GPU capability.

Edited May 14, 2018 by Madelaine McMasters