WebGPU is Finally Here
The successor to WebGL enables lower overhead, multi-threading hooks, and most importantly: Compute Shaders in the browser.
For over a decade, WebGL has been the standard for 3D graphics on the web. It was magical when it launched, allowing us to render 3D cubes without a plugin. But WebGL is based on OpenGL ES 2.0, an API designed in the early 90s. It simply doesn't map well to modern GPU architectures.
WebGPU is a complete reset. It exposes modern GPU primitives to the web, aligned with Metal (Apple), Vulkan (Khronos), and DirectX 12 (Microsoft). It reduces driver overhead significantly, allowing the browser to issue more draw calls per frame.
The Compute Revolution
The most transformative feature of WebGPU isn't just better graphics—it's Compute Shaders. In WebGL, if you wanted to do general math on the GPU (GPGPU), you had to hack it by pretending your data was pixels in a texture and rendering a "fake" image. It was brittle and hard to debug.
WebGPU treats Compute as a first-class citizen. This means we can run massive parallel algorithms directly on the GPU without any graphics pipeline overhead.
Use Cases
- Browser-side AI: Running inference for models like Stable Diffusion or private LLMs directly in the user's browser, using their GPU instead of expensive cloud servers.
- Physics Simulations: Simulating millions of particles for fluid dynamics, cloth, or boids simulations at 60fps.
- Video Processing: Real-time background removal, upscaling, or effect application on video streams.
WGSL: A New Language
WebGPU introduces WGSL (WebGPU Shading Language). It's a strictly typed language that compiles to the native shader language of the underlying system (MSL, HLSL, or SPIR-V). While learning a new language is a hurdle, WGSL prevents many of the undefined behaviors that plagued GLSL.
The Browser as the OS
With WebGPU, the gap between "Web App" and "Native App" is vanishing. Tools like Figma already push the boundaries of WebGL. With WebGPU, we will see full-fledged video editors, CAD software, and AAA-quality games running in a tab, with performance indistinguishable from a desktop executable.
We are currently building internal prototypes using WebGPU for real-time architectural visualization. The ability to calculate global illumination in the browser is game-changing for our clients.