[daredevildave]

I can't wait for compute shaders to be widely available on the web!

[jsheard]

Any idea how close Apple is to shipping stable WebGPU? They are the main bottleneck in terms of marketshare, Chrome has shipped it on Windows and Android already.

[ovenchips]

They feel pretty close to shipping this to me: https://webkit.org/blog/14879/webgpu-now-available-for-testi... They recently shipped an update that resolves all issues running PlayCanvas' WebGPU backend. My guess is that we're looking at 6-12 months to reach production. To track WebGPU support, I recommend this awesome site: https://web3dsurvey.com/webgpu

[edgedeveloper44]

Hopefully it will release later this year to coincide with iOS 18. As other commenters have mentioned, it's already available for developer testing.

[koolala]

Linux is missing it too. And WebGL2 beats WebGPU on all GPU performance benchmarks.

[givinguflac]

It’s in advanced safari iOS feature flags right now, and has been for a while. It works on the demos for PlayCanvas, but I can’t speak to long term stability .

[kamikazeturtles]

What sort of things will compute shaders on the web unlock that wasn't possible before? Asking as someone with only a little graphics programming experience

[pjmlp]

Basically they bring us back to the days of 3D software rendering algorithms, now however fully accelerated on the graphics card.

See offline renders like OTOY, that make use of CUDA.

However we could already have gotten them via WebGL Compute, as they are part of OpenGL ES, had its implementation not been sabotaged.

https://github.com/9ballsyndrome/WebGL_Compute_shader

https://registry.khronos.org/webgl/specs/latest/2.0-compute/

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40150444

[daredevildave]

They unlock a lot of advanced graphics techniques that are too slow to do CPU-side but work well in parallel on GPU. It's a pretty wide variety of things, but e.g. lighting, mesh manipulation, terrain, voxels, post-processing.

[ovenchips]

I think you'll begin to see more advanced particle systems and physical simulations for a start. And 3D Gaussian Splatting will probably benefit too (since compute will probably enable much faster sorting of splats). So it's not really that this stuff wasn't possible before...but compute will enable these techniques to run far faster.

[h4x0rr]

Better crypto miners in the browser

[astlouis44]

Native games on the web.

[Eduard]

With WebGPU, Stable Diffusion in the browser (watch out, once you click the "Generate" button, it will fetch 2 GByte of daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaata) (and probably make your laptop hang whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiile generating, as you can tell by my typing).

https://websd.mlc.ai/