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by 91edec 2350 days ago
Is there any good WebGPU tutorials?

I've been wanting to play around with graphics programming for a while and the web is such a perfect platform due to cross platform compatibility and lower barrier for entry.

2 comments

It's barely got any support ATM.

https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Implementation-Status

I doubt you'll see a lot of good tutorials for it until you start seeing it land in stable versions of browser (or even nightly builds tbh).

While starting to show it's age, WebGL should have a lot of tutorials and you can start working with it today.

I wonder if people will use WebGPU directly or use a higher level framework/library such as Babylon? Looks like it has support for it but doesn't seem everything is supported yet but haven't personally played with it.
I'm of the opinion that WebGPU should try not to be a friendly API on its own, but instead practically mandate a framework on top. This is the philosophy that the newer APIs like Vulkan/D3D12 adopt; that you should have a higher-level renderer driving it that's able to reason about your entire scene graph. I've suggested as much to the WG before, who roughly seem to agree.

[0] https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/171

I don't agree. The Vulkan and D3D12 APIs didn't have to be so programmer hostile, they're just badly designed APIs.

Thankfully, WebGPU took a lot of inspiration from the Metal API, and less from Vulkan and D3D12, and thus is usable without a "sanity layer".

That sanity layer ended up being yet another way to foster adoption of middleware engines.
I'm excited for it, but WebGPU is hardly close to ready yet. Right now they're still negotiating the shader language.

But if you want to learn some graphics programming on the web, I really recommend trying out regl. It's a great way to learn about graphics primitives without getting bogged down in the WebGL API directly.

https://github.com/regl-project/regl