Gaming on the web is about to get a massive boost as Google has announced the WebGPU tech is ready to roll out to the Chrome browser.
The forthcoming Chrome 113 release will include the new API, which the company describes as “a new dawn for web graphics”. The release is currently available in beta.
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Google says the new tech works by improving the access web apps have to the built-in graphics card to enable “high-performance 3D graphics and data-parallel computation on the web.”
Google says, for example, their app won’t have to run as much javascript to achieve the same graphical performance, while there’s also “three times improvements in machine learning model inferences.” This is only the beginning with Google promising the initial release is just a building block
The WebGPU tech will replace the existing WebGL and is on by default in Chrome 113. It has been in development since 2017 as part of a collaboration with Google, Mozilla, Apple, Intel and Microsoft. Firefox and Safari will be next to integrate WebGPU farther down the line.
In a blog post, Google says: “WebGPU is a new API for the web, which exposes modern hardware capabilities and allows rendering and computation operations on a GPU, similar to Direct3D 12, Metal, and Vulkan.
“Unlike the WebGL family of APIs, WebGPU offers access to more advanced GPU features and provides first-class support for general computations on the GPU. The API is designed with the web platform in mind, featuring an idiomatic JavaScript API, integration with promises, support for importing videos, and a polished developer experience with great error messages.”
