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GPUs are machines for crunching data, be it graphics or NNs. I can't think of many use case where that isn't true.

Also if you anticipate the GPU being used as an accelerator, that is all the more reason to use a text based format because it allows for easy code generation.



You are wrong. Many projects use GPUs without big datasets. See ShaderToy, for instance: a lot of computation, almost no input data. Many other games, too: they may use the GPU for rendering fast yet have say 50 MiB of textures and assets only.

If you think of AAA games, ML and whatnot, of course. But I doubt anybody will use WebGPU for those, to be honest.


50MB of textures is a lot compared to shader source code size, which will be in the kilobytes for such a small project.

The same with shadertoy, the storage or transmission of a shadertoy shader is never going to be significant compared to all the assets on the page.

The contention was that a binary representation is necessary to save space for storage or transmission. It just isn't.




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