WebGPU – All of the cores, none of the canvas

I&#x27;ve busted my ass on webgl a few times, and I am not really seeing how WebGPU is a substantially better API looking at the samples in the wild:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webkit.org&#x2F;demos&#x2F;webgpu&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;hello-triangle.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webkit.org&#x2F;demos&#x2F;webgpu&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;hello-triangle.js</a><p>The advantages of WebGPU vs WebGL probably make sense to experts in this area, but I still find most of it to be completely impenetrable at first glance as a relative novice.

For those looking for a complete 3D engine already supporting WebGPU and with a WebGL fallback if needed, there is BabylonJs (you&#x27;ll need the 5.0 version still in the release candidate state) : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.babylonjs.com&#x2F;advanced_topics&#x2F;webGPU&#x2F;webGPUStatus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.babylonjs.com&#x2F;advanced_topics&#x2F;webGPU&#x2F;webGPUStatu...</a><p>ThreeJs is alwo working on its WebGPU renderer

If anyone wants to play with webgl&#x2F;webgl2&#x2F;webgpu&#x2F;high-perf js, we&#x27;re looking for a graphics engineer for all sorts of fun viz scaling projects (graphs used by teams tackling misinfo, global supply chains, money laundering, genomics, etc.): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.graphistry.com&#x2F;careers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.graphistry.com&#x2F;careers</a><p>Agreed with other folks here: We see opportunities to advance over what we did with WebGL (opengl es 2.0 from 10-20 years ago)... but as far as we can tell, still a puzzle to work around missing capabilities relative to what we do with modern opencl&#x2F;cuda on the server. So definitely an adventure!

Am I understanding this right, that websites can now run a crypto miner in the background when I visit them?

So now there are three incompatible graphics APIs in the browsers which are also incomplete in different ways. Each of them is a huge chunk of code that needs to maintained and updated.

This is off-topic but I instantly started reading the article in Surmas voice. I mean this as a compliment. Surma and Jake&#x27;s HTTP203 on YouTube is superb content.

Is this API going to have a permissions lock, like access to the video camera or microphone APIs do?<p>If it doesn&#x27;t, I&#x27;m not looking forward to the future where every website I visit tries to pull a big chunk of my graphics card to mine cryptocurrencies without my explicit authorization.

Question for someone with gpu programming experience: is it feasible to analyze time series data (eg.: run a trading algorithm through a series of stock prices) in parallel (with the algorithms receiving different parameters in each core)?<p>If not then what is the limiting factor?

If I&#x27;m already familiar with Rust, how is WebGPU as an introduction to graphics programming if you aren&#x27;t already familiar with any of the backends that it wraps? Should I try just learning Vulcan first? Is the abstraction layer just going to introduce additional confusion for a newbie?

Re: compute vs. Graphics pipelines: “and also considerably understates that these pipelines are physically different circuits in your GPU”<p>Wait what?? Can someone fill me in? Why would they have different hardware? Compute is compute, even if the computer is mostly good at triangles.

WebGPU, all the bare metal crashes&#x2F;exploits and none of the broad support. Browsers should not be operating systems and the move to make them so will end up making them just as exploitable as your host OS only much slower due to the additional abstraction layers.

With the &quot;fun&quot; to rewrite all WebGL shaders into WGSL.

Will there be an http203 episode about this? ;-)

great writeup!<p>For those interested, I was only able to get the demos running in Chrome Canary with &quot;Unsafe WebGPU&quot; enabled.

Another thing to turn off in FireFox. Already have WebRTC, WebGL, WASM, ServiceWorkers etc disabled. Most sites are so much faster without all this junk

WebGPU is a textbook case of Embrace Extend Extinguish performed by Apple to kill Kronos and SPIRV, and everybody is cheering it on. Crazy.

One request for the author: Please don&#x27;t hide the scroll bars on websites you make like this!