Chrome 113 To Ship WebGPU By Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Chrome 113 To Ship WebGPU By Default

While Chrome 112 just shipped this week and Chrome 113 only in beta, there is already a big reason to look forward to that next Chrome web browser release: Google is finally ready to ship WebGPU support! WebGPU provides the next-generation high performance 3D graphics API for the web...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Chrome-113-To-Ship-WebGPU

[user1]

Is this going to completely replace OpenGL ES for general rendering in Chromium, or is this just a successor to WebGL?

[kpedersen]

Is this going to completely replace OpenGL ES for general rendering in Chromium, or is this just a successor to WebGL?

Presumably WebGL is just going to sit on top of WebGPU rather than the ad-hoc mess in many browsers.
Possibly we can get rid of angle in some browsers.

[Artim]

Is this going to completely replace OpenGL ES for general rendering in Chromium, or is this just a successor to WebGL?

At least not in the near future, as Vulkan and others won't be replacing OpenGL completely in the foreseeable future. Those APIs are much more low level, which means on one hand that they have less overhead, but also on the other hand they aren't as user/programmer friendly. So first you will want to wait for toolkits to enable generating the low level code, and even then debugging will be easier in the high level languages. So maybe on some point Vulkan and WebGPU will replace OpenGL and WebGL, but unless there's a huge benefit of switching, that would probably make most sense for graphics heavy websites like Google Earth and maybe at some point Maps, but right now the drawbacks of bigger complexity will outweigh the benefits. But it will enable things that weren't possible/usable with WebGL. Especially in combination with PWAs etc there might be more advanced web versions of typical desktop apps.

[oleid]

Meanwhile Firefox and other browsers continue working on supporting the W3C WebGPU API.

Well, it's not as if it wouldn't already work in Firefox. It's simply not activated by default. And even for chrome they are still working on their support.

Edit:

https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Implementation-Status#firefox-and-servo

[Artim]

Well, it's not as if it wouldn't already work in Firefox. It's simply not activated by default.

The same is also true for Chrome. The difference is, Google things their implementation is mature enough to be on by default, and to not warn users with a permanent notification bar on top of every page that it is activated and not deemed safe enough. Nobody said it wouldn't work at all in Firefox.

[codewiz]

Not yet available on Linux, perhaps because the Vulkan backend can't be enabled due to outstanding bugs: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/dawn/issues/detail?id=1593

[rob-tech]

This is great, hopefully Firefox enablement will come soon as I no longer use Chrome and use Firefox on Android, Linux and Windows with a Firefox account and seamless syncing of all things. For me Firefox is simply a much nicer browser especially on Android as you can easily block crappy ads and aren't bound to Google's useless telemetry, in addition, the battery lasts longer with Firefox Android.

[mb_q]

At least not in the near future, as Vulkan and others won't be replacing OpenGL completely in the foreseeable future. Those APIs are much more low level, which means on one hand that they have less overhead, but also on the other hand they aren't as user/programmer friendly. So first you will want to wait for toolkits to enable generating the low level code, and even then debugging will be easier in the high level languages. So maybe on some point Vulkan and WebGPU will replace OpenGL and WebGL, but unless there's a huge benefit of switching, that would probably make most sense for graphics heavy websites like Google Earth and maybe at some point Maps, but right now the drawbacks of bigger complexity will outweigh the benefits. But it will enable things that weren't possible/usable with WebGL. Especially in combination with PWAs etc there might be more advanced web versions of typical desktop apps.

More like Vulkan will never be cross-platform, hence some kind of WebGPU low-level implementation will take over as a standard abstraction. OpenGL on the other hand will be available as some user-space library implemented on top of that, possibly also generally marketed as an engine for WebGL.

[Artim]

More like Vulkan will never be cross-platform, hence some kind of WebGPU low-level implementation will take over as a standard abstraction. OpenGL on the other hand will be available as some user-space library implemented on top of that, possibly also generally marketed as an engine for WebGL.

Vulkan already is cross-platfrom, maybe with the exception of iOS, if Apple likes it or not. And no, WebGPU will never be a replacement for it. It simply makes no sense.