Very happy to see this as it means that our gpu-allocator [0] crate (used currently by wgpu's dx12 backend, but capable of supporting vulkan & metal as well) will see a significant wider audience then what we've been using it for so far (which is shipping our gpu benchmark suite: evolve [1]
Thanks, looking forward to the Linux implementation as well. Are there any webgpu demos worth trying when this is released?
s-macke · 53m ago
Most of the sites I’ve seen are indeed just demos. I especially like Compute Toys [0], a Shadertoy clone for WebGPU. [1] is probably the best place to find demos. I have a site myself in which I experiment mainly with WebGPU Compute Shaders [2].
I was feeling a bit dirty playing around with WebGPU with only Chrome into the game thus far, even Safari has enabled their preview quite recently.
pixelpoet · 1h ago
Nice one, been waiting for this! Thanks to the devs.
tux3 · 1h ago
Great news, congrats to the gfx team!
nmstoker · 29m ago
Great news. Now hope they can sort it for Firefox on Android.
darkwater · 1h ago
Very cool! Now, let see how much will take for G-products to actually use it and not complaining about "browser not supported for this feature, use Chrome".
sroussey · 1h ago
Which google products use it?
darkwater · 29m ago
I don't know :) I was referring basically to the Meet situation back in the day with FF where the feature was there but Meet complained the browser was not capable.
chrismorgan · 5m ago
There was a genuine technical reason for that, a part of WebRTC that Firefox hadn’t implemented yet, where if even a single member of a group call lacked that feature, it had to fall back to something that used a lot more CPU for everyone. Can’t remember the details exactly, but it was approximately that.
mort96 · 1h ago
The one I can think of is Google Meet, where some GPU-thing is used to add background effects such as blur. However I'm not sure this actually uses WebGPU; it used to use on Firefox until Google added a browser check, and AFAIK, if you could fool Meet to think Firefox was Chrome, it would still work.
This might still be a semi-legitimate thing, i.e maybe they kept around a WebGL implementation for a while as a fallback but moved the main implementation to WebGPU and don't want to maintain the fallback. It certainly fits well into their strategy of making sure that the web really only works properly with Chrome.
I'm on Brave Linux which requires special flag for WebGPU (not turned on for me) and can confirm that background blur still works with Meet without WebGPU
[0]: https://github.com/Traverse-Research/gpu-allocator/
[1]: https://www.evolvebenchmark.com/
[0] https://compute.toys/
[1] https://github.com/mikbry/awesome-webgpu
[2] https://github.com/s-macke/WebGPU-Lab
It also works without WebGPU, just very slowly.
I was feeling a bit dirty playing around with WebGPU with only Chrome into the game thus far, even Safari has enabled their preview quite recently.
This might still be a semi-legitimate thing, i.e maybe they kept around a WebGL implementation for a while as a fallback but moved the main implementation to WebGPU and don't want to maintain the fallback. It certainly fits well into their strategy of making sure that the web really only works properly with Chrome.