Comment by jms55 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jms55 | Hacker News Reader

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Most of Nanite (at least, everything but the LOD system, I haven't tried that part, and the compute rasterizer due to lack of storage image atomics because Metal lacks them...) is implementable in WebGPU actually.

I have a PR that does a lot of the same things (meshlets, visbuffer, material depth, two pass occlusion culling) open for Bevy https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/10164 that I've been working on, which uses WebGPU.

WebGPU is actually a pretty good API imo. It's missing some advanced features like raytracing, mesh shaders, and subgroup operations (coming soon!), but it can still do a lot.

The much bigger missing feature is "bindless" support (non-uniform arrays of bound resources). BindGroup overhead (and ergonomics) is a significant downside.

Great points. JMS55, are you interested in contributing to UE5 WebGPU? My team and I have been working on this for the past several years, and would welcome some help.

If you're ever looking to join a team to advance Unreal Engine 5 and graphics in the browser, please reach out. We're tackling Nanite and Lumen in the browser, and contributing to the WebGPU spec in collaboration with Google.

You can reach me on Discord - my username is astlouis44

I'm also on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-st-louis-3986a5102/

Thanks for the offer, but unfortunately developing one game engine at a time is my limit :). I'm avoiding looking at UE source code specifically to ensure I don't accidentally copy code into Bevy.

Best of luck though, and always glad to see more people work on the WebGPU spec! Maybe you can help push for raytracing and bindless extensions :)

Interesting, does it work on the browser, or wgpu?

I've only ever tested it in wgpu, but there's no reason it shouldn't work in the browser (WebGPU). It only needs compute shaders, storage buffers, and single indirect draws, which are all available in WebGPU.

I see, thanks. Maybe I should not be so negative about it. :)

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