[zurn]

I just went through comments from all the times this has been reposted in the past 10 years, and this is (so far) the first time there aren't any complaints about not working in their browser! I'm counting just the submissions that got >10 comments.

The previous time, from 2017[1], was already quite good - there was only a single complaint, and that was about someone missing a WebGL extension this needs for floating point textures.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14432809

[nothis]

Ineresting!

The first line: "This demo requires a decent graphics card and up-to-date drivers." made me chuckle at the humbleness since I'm running this in Firefox on a 10 year old laptop. Buttery smooth (I'd say 60fps) at what seems full native resolution.

I guess it's the "up-to-date" drivers part (or rather, browsers playing along with existing drivers) that makes the difference.

[seanw444]

Apparently even graphics cards that are terrible at actual graphics can run this (GT 710) at full FPS.

[Tade0]

Let me be the first then: Doesn't work on my Galaxy S8 - "This demo requires the OES_texture_float extension", so I guess it's the same issue.

Truth be told the phone is relatively old, but then again I haven't switched because it... still works and I assume many other owners made the same choice regarding their devices.

[moron4hire]

You may want to try temporarily disabling GPU blacklisting in chrome://flags or about: config (both Chrome and Firefox have this "feature"). There are a bunch of very specific hardware, OS version, driver version, and feature extension combinations that are disallowed in the browser.

Unfortunately, this feature is very obscure, not really explained anywhere, and no complete list of blocked configurations exists anywhere. I've heard that it's supposedly to protect from buggy implementations that might allow a sandbox escape exploit. But again, that's just hearsay, there's really no official, up to date documentation on any of this

[Tade0]

I happen to know it, because for years there was an issue with hardware acceleration in Chrome on Mali cards (something something EXT_robustness), so I just chalked it up as the same sort of fuckery.

Thanks for reminding though.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Is it the Mali (Exynos) or the Adreno (Snapdragon) variant?

I doubt either would actually lack float texture support though. The WebGL implementation perhaps has weird requirements for when to allow this extension.

[Tade0]

Exynos.

I checked and indeed it's not listed when looking at chrome://gpu

Works on Firefox though.

[jlokier]

It works on my Galaxy S8 when I view the page from HN reader Materialistic :)

That's because it runs fine in Firefox Focus. The error message shows up in Samsumg Internet Browser and Chrome though.

(S8 is a great device. I don't want to "upgrade" - hate the notch on newer versions, the S8 still performs very well, and I don't know of any feature only in newer phones that I have a use worth paying for.)

[zurn]

S8 was released in 2017, for anyone else curious.

[amh1]

I replied almost at the same time as yours and my phone is galaxy a32 and getting the same error message as yours.

[cmroanirgo]

It works fine on my Samsung A8 using Firefox Nightly, but not on FireFox 68.

[plekter]

It works in Firefox on my a32

[amh1]

Yes. By seeing your comment, I just installed firefox and tested.It works fine.

[bestest]

It's terribly slow on my Monterey OSX Safari, yet flawless on Chrome.

[garblegarble]

Might be worth checking if your Mac is in low-power mode? On my M1 Max, on low power it's a bit laggy but on normal mode it's snappy (Monterey, Safari 15.1). Safari appears to resource-limit WebGL in Low Power mode, whereas Firefox/Chrome don't

[WA]

Flawless on iOS 15 Safari

[ta988]

It is flawless on my 4 years old $200 phone...

[danaris]

Works great on my Big Sur Safari...

[WithinReason]

I get:

400 Bad Request, You have attempted to access this site via TLS (HTTPS), but it is not configured for TLS access.

Probably because I have "dom.security.https_only_mode" enabled in Firefox

[sigg3]

Getting:

"Uncaught Error: This demo requires the OES_texture_float extension"

That's a Mozilla browser on Android though.

[SergeAx]

I think it's your phone, not software. Got it working on Mozilla @ Xiaomi Mi 8, quite dated model.

[amh1]

It does not work on my galaxy a32 phone. I tried with both samsung internet and chrome.

[zurn]

Looked up the release date for this phone: January 2021.