[adastra22]

Don’t be fooled by “web” in the name. Just like WebAssembly is/will be a better JVM, WebGPU is already posed to be a better OpenGL/Vulkan. It is a full graphics API unconstrained by browser implementations, and available without a browser runtime.

[fayalalebrun]

I am curious, in what ways is WebGPU better than Vulkan or Metal? From my point of view, WebGPU going back to an interpreted shading language like OpenGL makes it conceptually closer to JavaScript than WebAssembly.

[adastra22]

HLSL has in practice become the shader language for Vulkan, and Metal has always had a high-level shading language. The GPU market is simply too heterogeneous for a low-level ISA like SPIR-V to be applicable and performant across all architectures. A modern GPU driver effectively has to "decompile" SPIR-V binaries, then recompile it to the actual vendor-specific architecture used on the installed GPU, and perform both high-level and low-level optimizations. Standardizing on a single high level shading language, but one purposefully designed to be cross-platform, is actually the simpler architecture here.

[tlb]

I wrote a big visualization application with WebGPU and I'm happy with the choice. It's much cleaner than OpenGL, without as much complexity as Vulkan or Metal. It runs on Mac & Linux, and I got a demo version working in the browser with emscripten fairly easily. It doesn't have the trouble with OpenGL version compatibility that used to make supporting multiple platforms a hassle.

I'm not sure what's 'interpreted' about it. On Mac, the wgpu-native driver transcodes to the Metal shading language and it gets compiled.

[mschuetz]

I gave up on Vulkan simply because it's too overengineered and cumbersome. WebGPU, on the other hand, is relatively easy to use, even though it is build on many of the same concepts.

[adastra22]

WebGPU IS basically Metal, but cross platform. When the W3C decided to standardize a new graphics API, Apple submitted a proposal that was basically Metal with a name change. That proposal became the basis of WebGPU, though like any committee standard it has undergone multiple revisions since then.

Metal itself was basically Apple looking at Vulkan and saying “Lol, no way in hell. That’s a stinking mess of complexity.” Then they went off and made a simpler, less boilerplate, easier to code but just as performant and powerful API for Apple platforms. Now WebGPU makes all those improvements available everywhere.

And ignore the Web prefix: WebGPU is a lower level API, like DX12, Vulkan or Metal. It just came out of the W3C, hence the name. Unfortunately the name makes people think that it is a JavaScript browser extension or something, which is is not. You can call it from a browser, yes, and the API is designed to enable sandboxed instances for that purpose, but that’s a higher level integration, just like how WebGL exposes OpenGL ES.

In fact maybe that’s a better way to explain it. Until now if you wanted 3D in a browser you had to use WebGL which gave you a OpenGL ES compatible API. Except OpenGL is ancient and GLES doesn’t support vendor extensions, so this was a really shitty situation. W3C decided “Let’s make a new low level graphics API to replace OpenGL ES, and a new JavaScript browser extension to expose that API [replacing WebGL]” and they decided to confusingly call at various times both things, and the whole stack together when integrated with a browser “WebGPU.”

However most of the excitement and work surrounding WebGPU right now is around Rust and C++ frameworks that are using WebGPU as a platform and device independent middleware framework, since the standard implementations will performantly transform WebGPU calls into Metal, Vulkan, or DX12 system calls based on what the end user system supports, making it an excellent middleware that is really easy to target. So really, WebGL is a replacement for OpenGL in a way that Vulkan was not.

[blarg1]

Vulkan is too hard and metal is only for mac.

[pjmlp]

It isn't WebGPU any longer if it is incompatible with browsers.