[x3d-public] Note: WebGPU available major browsers

[John Carlson]

https://web.dev/blog/webgpu-supported-major-browsers

"A growing ecosystem

You don't have to start from scratch to use WebGPU! The libraries you love
already support WebGPU:

   - Babylon.js <https://doc.babylonjs.com/setup/support/webGPU>
   - PlayCanvas
   <https://blog.playcanvas.com/build-webgpu-apps-today-with-playcanvas/>
   - ONNX Runtime <https://onnxruntime.ai/docs/tutorials/web/ep-webgpu.html>
   - React Native <https://github.com/wcandillon/react-native-webgpu>
   - Three.js <https://threejs.org/examples/?q=webgpu>
   - Transformers.js <https://huggingface.co/blog/transformersjs-v3>
   - TypeGPU <https://docs.swmansion.com/TypeGPU/>
   - Unity
   <https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.3/Documentation/Manual/WebGPU.html>

Plus, the underlying engines—Dawn <https://dawn.googlesource.com/dawn>
(Chromium)
and wgpu <https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu> (Firefox)—are standalone,
portable packages. They simplify cross-platform development, making it
incredibly straightforward to bring platform-specific GPU apps over to the
web by using Wasm <https://webassembly.org/> and tools like emscripten
<https://emscripten.org/> and Rust web-sys
<https://docs.rs/web-sys/latest/web_sys/>."


Probably the best thing right now is to try to get x3dom apps working in
React Native (and React!)

I already have a simple cube working in React and X3DOM, see:

https://github.com/coderextreme/contactsapp

How is X3D support in Unity going?

What I'm going to try to do is upgrade my PlayCanvas OpenGL shaders to WGSL
next.  I hope they work!

Well...playcanvas WebGPU is in beta.  I tested my WebGL 1.0 shader, and it
worked, then I tried to shift to WebGPU still using WebGL.  Bam!
[image: image.png]

A apparently, the PlayCanvas WGSL JavaScript interface is not well
documented yet!  It seems like they are collapsing vertex/fragment shader
pairs into one structure per pair, and putting WGSL and GLSL together.

RayGPU, a Vulkan/WebGPU/dawn lightweight 2D/3D engine written in C/C++
based on raylib is advancing well, with a strategy like this
https://manuel5975p.github.io/rgdoc/ Note that this can be difficult to
compile!  I found using Visual Studio 2026’s cmake and ninja useful!  I may
translate some Nim programs to  C/C++.  Waiting on Pascal and Nim
bindings!  I haven’t gotten my WGSL shaders working anywhere yet, but I did
get them converted from GLSL using glslValidator and tint.  Naga and
spirv-cross (?) didn’t work to translate SPIR-V to wgsl.  I would translate
GLSL to WGSL with AI/LLM, or you can modify my program.

This is all on Windows 11.


The following have not been researched:

Possibility for a new Java renderer for Xj3D:

https://github.com/MyWorldLLC/webgpu-java probably port a higher level
package on top of this!

Shaders in TypeScript!
https://github.com/software-mansion/TypeGPU
<https://github.com/software-mansion/TypeGPU?tab=readme-ov-file#projects-using-typegpu>
Outputs
WebGpu!  But probably Babylon.js is preferred.

While one may consider Three.Js, it’s not fully typescript, and works well
with react.

I can se how tools like X_ITE might be hesitant to adopt WebGPU, likely due
to differences in Shader interfaces.  AFAIK, GLSL is available in WebGPU.

All for now.

John
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