DirectX 11 Coming To Browser Games

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday February 23, 2010 @08:47PM from the see-the-stubble-on-your-stick-figure's-chin dept.

arcticstoat writes "Forget Farmville, Flash puzzlers and 8-bit home computer emulators. The next generation of browser games will be able to take advantage of DirectX 11 effects, not to mention multi-core processing and both Havok and PhysX physics effects. A new browser plug-in called WebVision will be available for Trinergy's new game engine, Vision Engine 8. This will enable game developers to port all the advanced effects from the game engine over to all the common browsers. Of course, any budding 3D-browser-game dev will face the problem that not every PC has a decent graphics card that can handle advanced graphics effects. Not only that, but limited bandwidth will also limit what effects a developer can realistically implement into a browser game. Nevertheless, this is an interesting development that could result in some tight 3D programming, as well as some much more interesting browser games."

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Bandwidth is a killer by SplashMyBandit · 2010-02-23 20:56 · Score: 4, Interesting

3D graphics is bandwidth intensive, especially for textures. 3D accelerated postage stamps just won't be that compelling. Procedural textures are vastly smaller but are rather labour intensive to create. While this is a nice concept it won't be replacing downloaded 3D content anytime soon. I have enough trouble convincing people to wait for a 2MB Java applet that's downloaded once and cached with WebStart.
Spyware on my GPU by SpazmodeusG · 2010-02-23 21:09 · Score: 4, Interesting

Shaders these days are fully programmable and DirectX allows access to them. I can't see any reason why a shader run off of a webpage couldn't do whatever it wants.
Graphics cards don't have any privilege ring security like x86s do. They simply trust that whatever shader that is sent to run on them is as trusted as the application running on the CPU that sends them the shader.
With this plan your browser will be sending your graphics card shaders to run from whatever website you visit.

Either they are going to have to prune the API down a lot before it is safe (without shaders you may as well be using an earlier version of DirectX), or they are going to have a security nightmare.