Mastering the WebGL Pipeline
( Diving into custom GLSL shaders, GPU pipeline architecture, and the discipline required to achieve 120 FPS in the browser. )
WebGL represents the rawest form of web graphics, stripping away the comfort of higher-level abstractions. When we write custom GLSL shaders, we're not just drawing pixels; we're orchestrating the GPU at a fundamental level.
The architecture of a custom rendering pipeline requires strict discipline: managing vertex attributes, organizing uniform data, and optimizing draw calls. It's an environment where mathematical precision directly translates to visual fidelity.
One critical insight I've gathered through iterative profiling is that the bottleneck is almost never the fragment shader — it's the vertex count and the number of draw calls. Instanced rendering, frustum culling, and LOD stratification are not optional optimizations; they're foundational architectural decisions. A scene that runs at 18 FPS without culling can easily hit 120 FPS once you respect the hardware's memory hierarchy.