Whom is WebGPU for, besides Unity?
> whom is WebGPU for? […] it’s a huge rigamarole.
Where is this comment coming from? WebGPU enables compute shaders, and there are applications in anything that uses a GPU, from ML to physics to audio to … you name it. What is making you think game engines would be the only users? I bet a lot of companies are looking forward to being able to use compute shaders in JS apps and web pages.
> Godot has had zero development for WebGPU support.
Why would Godot be an indicator? I love Godot and their efforts, but it’s less than 1% of game engine market share, and a much smaller less well funded team. Of course they’re not on the bleeding edge. Unity is closer to 30% market share and is actively engaging with WebGPU, so it seems like you’re downplaying and contradicting a strong indicator.
> WebGPU enables compute shaders, and there are applications in anything that uses a GPU, from ML to physics to audio to … you name it.
I know.
If you have to go through a giant product like Unity for example to use WebGPU because Apple will essentially have its own flavor of WebGPU just like it has its own flavor of everything, is it really cross platform?
Does Apple support Vulkan? No. It was invented for middlewares!
Apple has a flag to toggle on WebGPU on iOS today. I know dude. What does that really mean?
They have such a poor record of support for gamey things on Mobile Safari. No immersive WebXR, a long history of breaking WASM, a long history of poor WebGL 2 and texture compression support. Why is this going to be any different?
Safari has WebGPU support today, albeit behind a feature flag until it's fully baked. https://imgur.com/a/b3spVWd
Not sure if this is good, but animometer shows an Avg Frame time of ~25.5 ms on a Mac Studio M1 Max with Safari 18.2 (20620.1.16.11.6). https://webgpu.github.io/webgpu-samples/sample/animometer/
Not really. Bevy https://bevyengine.org uses WebGPU exclusively, and we have unfortunately little funding - definitely not $2 billion. A lot of the stuff proposed in the article (bindless, 64-bit atomics, etc) is stuff we (and others) proposed :)
If anything, WebGPU the spec could really use _more_ funding and developer time from experienced graphics developers.
Why are people downvoting? The idea of Great High Performance Graphics Effortlessly on All Platforms is very appealing. It is fundamentally empathetic. It is an opium to game developers whose real antagonist is Apple and Nintendo, and who want a more organic journey in game development than Unity Learn. Is it a realizable goal? Time will tell.
Everyone should be advocating for more focused efforts, but then. Are you going to say, Bevy is better than Godot? It’s subjective right? Open source efforts are already spread so thin. An inability to rally behind one engine means achieving 2013’s Unity 5 level of functionality is years away.
Looking at it critically, in fact much effort in the open source ecosystem is even anti games. For example emulators used to pirate Nintendo Switch games have more mature multiplatform graphics engine implementations than Godot and Bevy do. It would be nice if that weren’t true, you might tell me in some sense that I am wrong, but c’mon. It’s crazy how much community effort goes into piracy compared to the stuff that would sincerely benefit game developers.
WebGPU is authored by giant media companies, and will have purposefully hobbled support by the most obnoxious of them all, Apple - the one platform where it is kind of impractical to pirate stuff, but also, where it is kind of impractical to deliver games through the browser. Precisely because of the empathetic, yet ultimately false, promises of WebGPU.
That you can write a "compute shader" once, and it will run "anywhere." This isn't the case with any accelerated compute API, so why is WebGPU going to be different?
Reality will be Chrome Windows Desktop WebGPU, Chrome Android (newish) WebGPU, Mobile Safari iOS 18 WebGPU, iPad WebGPU, macOS Safari WebGPU, macOS Chrome WebGPU, iOS default in app browser WebGPU, Instagram and Facebook in app browser WebGPU...
This isn't complicated! If that's reality, I'd rather have:
Apple Compute Shaders for Browser. Windows Chrome Compute Shaders for Browser. Android Chrome Compute Shaders for Browser.
Because I'm going to go through a middleware like Unity to deal with both situations. But look at which is simpler. It's not complicated.
> I’m trying to understand if and why you do.
I make games. I like the status quo where we get amazing game engines for free.
I cannot force open source developers to do anything. They are welcome to waste their time on any effort. If Bevy has great WebGL 2 support, which runs almost without warts everywhere, even on iOS, for example, it makes no sense to worry about WebGPU at all, due to the nature of the games that use Bevy. Because "runs on WebGPU" is making-believe that you can avoid the hard multiplatform engine bits. Engines like Construct and LOVE and whatever - 2D games don't need compute shaders, they are not very performance sensitive, use the browser as the middleware, and the ones that are, they should just use a huge commercial game engine. People have choices.
Can you post a link to that quote? What exactly are you quoting?
Unity spends the vast majority of its money on other things, and Unity isn’t the only company that will make use of WebGPU. Saying nobody will have success with it is like saying nobody will succeed at using CUDA. We’re just talking about compute shaders. What is making you think they’re too hard to use without Apple’s help?
Apple's WebGPU implementation in Safari is entirely spec compliant, and this time they've actually been faster than Firefox.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrLyZ24UcRE
Apple maps and others also use it
https://www.construct.net/en/free-online-games/ultra-pixel-s...
Which Construct 3 game should I try on Mobile Safari?
I know there are other game engines. Supporting Mobile Safari is very very hard. It has its own flavor of everything. I would never speak in absolutes about some web standard and how it will work on Mobile Safari.
I’m not dunking on the engine. It’s just to say, well this is what graphics programming in browser is: making shit work on mobile Safari.