As already stated in my year 2023 plans, there will be some time for graphics programming. Back in the days I was exploring OpenGL but that was way long ago. Nowadays I think to try something much simpler and accessible like for instance WebGL. This library relies on JavaScript for logic and OpenGL ES for presentation layer. So it is hardware accelerated.

But there are some issues with this acceleration. On some computers you can specifically select particular GPU in BIOS/UEFI. However not on every computer. To start with I tried on Lenovo ThinkPad T420s with NVIDIA NVS 4200M. Testing on aquarium demo (which can be found here) I get stable 37 FPS on 5k elements with somewhere around 95 – 99% of load. There is sometimes some performance degradation when FPS count goes as low as 10. GPU and CPU temperature show the same value of 95 degress C. That is way too much. This computer has great advantage over others because it has NVIDIA Optimus feature which gives be ability to switch between graphics chips or let harware to choose itself which GPU should be used at the moment.

My other machine, which is Dell G15 lack such a feature and Ubuntu 22 picks integrated Intel UHD 10th gen GPU instead of heavy NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti. So on this integrated chip we have stable 45 FPS, but without any performance drops. I am able to run Firefox browser on “discrete graphics” because I have this proprietary driver but it gives me only 50 FPS, so only 5 more than integrated one. It shows only 30% load on nvidia-smi so it is not doing that much. I tell you even more, on 30k elements there is more FPS on integrated GPU (20 vs 15). I do not quite get it what is going on here.

I still test it on various other harware configurations and it gives more weird unexpecting results.