Actually, Gabe Newell at last year's CES (last January) was talking about NVIDIA Maxwell architecture. He claims NVIDIA will allow GPU virtualization for gaming applications. In other words, one PC could power multiple netbooks or Roku-style Steam boxes.

That said, split-screen (even multi-monitor "split-screen") is cool and occasionally occurs in PC games.

Fir..! Dangit : ( Guess not.

"Perpetual Motion Engine" can operate on the FILE protocol. You can point the web browser to a web page located on your hard drive (or a USB thumb drive) and it will work.

It can be run from a website over HTTP, but does not need to be. Heck, you could even burn it to a DVD and double-click the index.html file in it.

Actually the demo doesn't raytrace. In this demo "scene" (one triangle) it uses barycentric coordinates to determine if a pixel is inside or outside of a triangle. If it is inside? It shades it with one of two functions. These two functions derive red, green, and blue from how far the pixel is away from a vertex compared to the distance between that vertex and the center of the opposite edge (the animated function also has a time component). If it is outside the triangle? Pixel is skipped.

The specific algorithm is somewhat irrelevant (although it is actually pretty efficient for very large triangles). The point is that the GPUs are not limited to scanline triangles passed by a graphics API anymore.

Because a GeForce Titan has about 2700 cores and about 4.5 teraflops of performance.

But yes, even CPUs have OpenCL drivers so (albeit Intel's is buggy as heck for the time being) so you could even select your CPU as your "graphics processor" and it would run... just slowly.

Only if you want it to! You can share resources between OpenCL and OpenGL without passing through the CPU.

Now, of course, you may wish to (example: copy to APU memory, run physics, copy to GPU memory, render)... but the programmer needs to explicitly queue a memory move command to do so. If the programmer doesn't move the content... it stays on wherever it is.

It's getting much closer. Most ASM.js demos show C++-compiled-into-Javascript is only half performance of native C++ (and getting faster). That's a difference between 30fps and 60fps if all code was Javascript. WebCL, on the other hand, is almost exactly OpenCL speeds... so for GPU-accelerated apps (depending on whether Javascript or WebCL is your primary bottleneck) you could get almost native performance.

SmallPtGPU, from the testing I did a while ago, seems to be almost the same speed whether run in WebCL via Javascript or OpenCL via C++

Some want to use the same algorithms OpenGL and DirectX does... and those APIs are still for them.

Some do not. A good example is Epic Games who, in 2008, predicted "100% of the rendering code" for Unreal Engine 4 would be programmed directly for the GPUs. The next year they found the cost prohibitive so they kept with DirectX and OpenGL at least for a while longer. Especially for big production houses, if there is a bug or a quirk in the rendering code, it would be nice to be able to fix the problem directly rather than hack in a workaround.

Actually, I look at web browsers as an art platform. It is programmed by a set of open standards which gives any person or organization the tools to build support for the content which is relevant to society. A video game, designed in web standards, could be preserved for centuries by whoever deems it culturally relevant.

For once, we have a gaming platform (besides Linux and BSD) which allows genuine, timeless art. If the W3C, or an industry body like them, creates an equivalent pseudo-native app platform... then great. For now, the web is the best we have.

I am not really sure Valve is intending to compete with the next generation of consoles. To me, Steam Machines seem to be filling the niche left behind by "Media Center Extenders". In other words, using the PC ecosystem to widen the market currently dominated by Rokus and invaded by consoles. It will overlap with consoles, and may even prove them redundant, but I do not see Steam Machines as aimed at consoles.