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WebGPU

Category
Graphics
Type
New or changed feature
Status
Enabled by default (Chrome 113)
Intent stage
Origin Trial

Summary

WebGPU is the successor to the WebGL and WebGL 2 graphics APIs for the Web. It provides modern features such as “GPU compute” as well as lower overhead access to GPU hardware and better, more predictable performance. WebGPU is developed by the “GPU for the Web” W3C community group.

Motivation

WebGPU is a proposed Web API to enable webpages to use the system’s GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) to perform computations and draw complex images that can be presented inside the page. This goal is similar to the WebGL family of APIs, but WebGPU enables access to more advanced features of GPUs. Whereas WebGL is mostly for drawing images but can be repurposed (with great effort) to do other kinds of computations, WebGPU has first-class support for performing general computations on the GPU.

Standards & signals

Docs: https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/wgsl https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/explainer

Samples: https://github.com/austinEng/webgpu-samples

Explainers: https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/explainer

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