OP is right. WebGPU is targeted towards the lowest common denominator, which is fairly old mobile phones. It therefore doesn't support modern features and is basically an outdated graphics API by design.
Mesh shaders, raytracing, DirectStorage, GPU work graphs, C++ features on shading languages, some of the post 2015 features that aren't coming to WebGPU any time soon.
Apart from the examples given by the other user: 64 bit integers and their atomics which are the bread and butter of efficient software rasterizers such as Nanite, or for point clouds which can be rendered multiple times faster with 64 bit atomics compared to using the "point-list" primitive; subgroup operations; bindless; sparse buffers; printf; timestamps inside shaders; async memcpy and copy without the necessity for an intermediate copy buffer and so much more. One of the worst is that they're adding limitations of all languages, but not the workarounds that may exist in them. Like WebGPU actively prohibits buffer aliasing or mixing atomic and non-atomic access to memory because of Apple's Metal Shading Language, but Metal supports it via workarounds! I mean... seriously? That actually makes WebGPU even worse than the lowest common denominator.
One of the turning points for the worse was the introduction of WGSL. Before WGSL, you could do lots of stuff with spirv shaders because they weren't artifically limited. But with WGSL, they went all in on turning WebGPU into a toy-language that only supports whatever last decades mobile phones support. I was really hopeful for WebGPU because UX-wise, it is so much better than anything else. Far better than Vulkan or OpenGL. But feature-wise, WebGPU so limited that I had to go back to desktop OpenGL.
In one way WebGPU really has become a true successor to WebGL though - it is a graphics API that is outdated on arrival.
adastra22|2 years ago
You just have to set limits correctly when you initialize a GPU instance in order to have access to the new features.
pjmlp|2 years ago
mschuetz|2 years ago
One of the turning points for the worse was the introduction of WGSL. Before WGSL, you could do lots of stuff with spirv shaders because they weren't artifically limited. But with WGSL, they went all in on turning WebGPU into a toy-language that only supports whatever last decades mobile phones support. I was really hopeful for WebGPU because UX-wise, it is so much better than anything else. Far better than Vulkan or OpenGL. But feature-wise, WebGPU so limited that I had to go back to desktop OpenGL.
In one way WebGPU really has become a true successor to WebGL though - it is a graphics API that is outdated on arrival.