The WebGPU API is the successor to the WebGL and WebGL 2 graphics APIs for the Web. It will provide modern features such as “GPU compute” as well as lower overhead access to GPU hardware and better, more predictable performance. WebGPU is being developed by the “GPU for the Web” W3C community group.

Motivation

WebGPU is a proposed Web API to enable webpages to use the system’s GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) to perform computations and draw complex images that can be presented inside the page. This goal is similar to the WebGL family of APIs, but WebGPU enables access to more advanced features of GPUs. Whereas WebGL is mostly for drawing images but can be repurposed (with great effort) to do other kinds of computations, WebGPU has first-class support for performing general computations on the GPU.

Demo

• https://github.com/austinEng/webgpu-samples

Documentation

• https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/
• https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/wgsl/
• https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/explainer/

Specification

Specification link

Status: Specification currently under development in a Working Group

Status in Chromium

Blink components: Blink>WebGPU

Implementation status: Origin trial (tracking bug)

Consensus & Standardization

• Firefox: In development
• Edge: In development
• Safari: In development
• Web Developers: Strongly positive

Owners

• cwallez@chromium.org
• bclayton@google.com
• kainino@chromium.org

Intent to Prototype url

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Last updated on 2021-09-13