← Back to context

Comment by conorbergin

8 days ago

Is webgpu a good standard at this point? I am learning vulkan atm and 1.3 is significantly different to the previous APIs, and apparently webgpu is closer in behavior to 1.0. I am by no means an authority on the topic, I just see a lack of interest in targeting webgpu from people in game engines and scientific computing.

7 comments

conorbergin

Reply
flohofwoe  8 days ago

For a text editor it's definitely good enough if not extreme overkill.

Other then that the one big downside of WebGPU is the rigid binding model via baked BindGroup objects. This is both inflexible and slow when any sort of 'dynamism' is needed because you end up creating and destroying BindGroup objects in the hot path.

Vulkan's binding model will really only be fixed properly with the very new VK_EXT_descriptor_heap extension (https://docs.vulkan.org/features/latest/features/proposals/V...).

  • xyzsparetimexyz  8 days ago

    The modern Vulkan binding model is relatively fine. Your entire program has a single descriptor set containing an array of images that you reference by index. Buffers are never bound and instead referenced by device address.

  • conorbergin  8 days ago

    Do you think Vulkan will become "nice" to use, could it ever be as ergonomic as Metal is supposed to be?

    • flohofwoe  7 days ago

      Apparently "joy to use" is one of the new core goals of Khronos for Vulkan. Whether they succeed remains to be seen, but at least they acknowledge now that a developer hostile API is a serious problem for adoption.

      The big advantage of Metal is that you can pick your abstraction level. At the highest level it's convenient like D3D11, at the lowest level it's explicit like D3D12 or Vulkan.

pornel  8 days ago

Bevy engine uses wgpu and supports both native and WebGPU browser targets through it.

The WebGPU API gets you to rendering your first triangle quicker and without thinking about vendor-specific APIs and histories of their extensions. It's designed to be fully checkable in browsers, so if you mess up you generally get errors caught before they crash your GPU drivers :)

The downside is that it's the lowest common denominator, so it always lags behind what you can do directly in DX or VK. It was late to get subgroups, and now it's late to get bindless resources. When you target desktops, wgpu can cheat and expose more features that haven't landed in browsers yet, but of course that takes you back to the vendor API fragmentation.

swiftcoder  8 days ago

It's a good standard if you want a sort of lowest-common-denominator that is still about a decade newer than GLES 3 / WebGL 2.

The scientific folks don't have all that much reason to upgrade from OpenGL (it still works, after all), and the games folks are often targeting even newer DX/Vulkan/Metal features that aren't supported by WebGPU yet (for example, hardware-accelerated raytracing)