WebGPU Status
Note that we will use Chrome Canary as our gauge browser for WebGPU features as other browsers are still lagging in term of feature support as of this writing (2022/01/16).
Make it work: Current status of the port
Most of the features of Babylon.js are now available in WebGPU. Here's a detailed list of what is not working / is partially working.
Features with incomplete support
- Point Cloud System
- WebGPU does not support a point size different from 1, so setting a value different from 1 for the point size won't be taken into account
Features not working because not implemented yet
- Support for triangle fan / line loop drawing mode
- WebGPU does not support those modes, we will need to emulate them with triangle strip and line strip
- Support types other than
float
for the vertex buffers (position, normal, uv, ...)- Contrary to WebGL, in WebGPU there's no automatic conversion from the type of the vertex buffer to the type used by shader
- Handle context lost/restore
- Multiview / WebXR
- Not implemented yet but not supported by Chrome / WebGPU specifications neither
Make it fast: Optimizations
The most important optimizations have now been done (see Optimizations), others could be considered:
- Use compute shaders to perform some conversions when reading data from buffers
- Use compute shaders to generate mipmaps
Other "nice-to-have" features
- Use
CreatePipelineAsync
for asynchronous pipeline creations
Browser Caveats
Chrome Canary does not support all WebGPU features yet (or some others are not fully functional yet), so here are some caveats:
- No WebGPU capabilities (caps) returned by the browser
- For the time being, we have set some hard values for the caps
- GPU timing in the Inspector does not work because timestamp queries are currently disabled in Chrome. You can start Chrome with the
--disable-dawn-features=disallow_unsafe_apis
flag if you want to enable them.