#webgpu

In this presentation, I'll explore the transition from WebGL to WebGPU, demonstrating how these changes affect game development. The talk will include practical examples and code snippets to illustrate key differences and their implications on performance and efficiency.

In this talk I will show Makepad, a new UI stack that uses Rust, Wasm, and WebGL. Unlike other UI stacks, which use a hybrid approach, all rendering in Makepad takes place on the GPU. This allows for highly polished and visually impressive applications that have not been possible on the web so far. Because Makepad uses Rust, applications run both natively and on the Web via wasm. Makepad applications can be very small, on the order of just a few hundred kilobytes for wasm, to a few megabytes with native. Our goal is to develop Makepad into the UI stack of choice for lightweight and performant cross-platform applications. We intend to ship with our own design application and IDE.

Unity can build games to run in a web browser using tools like Emscripten, Web Assembly, and WebGL. It provides integration with the browser, using browser APIs to simulate native APIs. Sometimes it is useful to interface with the browser in ways that Unity does not natively provide support for. In this talk, I will discuss how Unity builds games for the web, and how to extend Unity using Javascript to enable support for features not otherwise provided.

One of the major new features WebGPU introduces is compute shaders. I'll cover the basics of how they work and go through some applications that weren't possible before on the web. Examples include Unreal Engine 5's compute-based rendering techniques, and complex particle simulations.