Comment by nu11ptr

9 days ago

From the PR, it sounds like the switch to WGPU is only for linux. The team was reluctant to do the same for macOS/Windows since they felt their native renderer on those platforms was better and less memory intensive.

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nu11ptr

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swiftcoder  9 days ago

> they felt their native renderer on those platforms was better and less memory intensive

This definitely would be worth some profiling. I don't think it's a given that their custom stacks are going to beat wgpu in a meaningful way.

  • nicoburns  9 days ago

    > This definitely would be worth some profiling. I don't think it's a given that their custom stacks are going to beat wgpu in a meaningful way.

    They probably will for memory usage. Current wgpu seems to have a floor around ~100mb that isn't there with other rendering backends (and it was more like ~60mb with wgpu a few months / versions ago).

    Not sure if this is fixable in wgpu, or do with spec compatibility (my guess would be that it's fixable, just not top priority for the team atm).

  • MindSpunk  9 days ago

    WGPU is just a layer over the top of the native APIs on any given platform so unless Zed's DirectX/Metal renderers were particularly bad it's unlikely WGPU will be better here.

    • swiftcoder  9 days ago

      I'm not saying it would be better, I'm saying it may not be particularly much worse. Which still might make it worth simplifying everything by settling on one rendering abstraction

  • flohofwoe  9 days ago

    WebGPU has some surprising performance problems (although I only checked Google's Dawn library, not Rust's wgpu), and the amount of code that's pulled into the project is massive. A well-made Metal renderer which only implements the needed features will easily be 100x smaller (in terms of linecount) and most likely faster.

    • pjmlp  9 days ago

      There is also the issue that it is designed with JavaScript and browser sandbox in mind, thus the wrong abstraction level for native graphics middleware.

      I am still curious how much uptake WebGPU will end up having on Android, or if Java/Kotlin folks will keep targeting OpenGL ES.

  • vitorsr  9 days ago

    Please elaborate, I am curious to why would you think WebGPU would meaningfully beat their Metal/DirectX renderers.

    • swiftcoder  9 days ago

      I don't think it would, but I don't think it's a given that their homegrown renderer is wildly more performant either - people tend to overestimate the performance of naive renderers

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