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Awesome wgpu

A curated list of wgpu code and resources.

PRs welcome.

About wgpu

Ecosystem

  1. individual API libraries like ash, d3d12-rs, metal-rs - for the lowest hard-core level available to Rust
  2. gfx-hal for lowest portable level
  3. Rendy for helping to solve the rough corners of gfx-hal
  4. wgpu-rs for the lowest safe level
  5. Engines like ggez or Amethyst for the highest level

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust_gamedev/comments/bv7w2f/wgpurs_now_uses_rendy_to_manage_memory_and/

Learn

Gamedev

Rust gamedev

General gamedev

Physics/Collision

Games

Applications

Examples

Older

UI

Rendering

About Rendy

About Rendy and wgpu https://community.amethyst.rs/t/skepticism-about-rendy/1221/9

wgpu uses gfx-hal and parts of rendy, totally fine on DX12 on Windows https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/eh7wkx/the_state_of_ggez_2020/fcj1746/

We hoped Amethyst team would help, but that didn't happen either. https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/eh7wkx/the_state_of_ggez_2020/fcipapq/

Switching to rendy nearly killed this project due to the time and effort required https://community.amethyst.rs/t/skepticism-about-rendy/1221/11

This duality of APIs in gfx-hal worked to an extent. Providing safety was impossible without imposing some restrictions or overhead. In the command pool example, it’s only safe to re-use a command buffer if it’s done execution on the GPU, and the user doesn’t intent to use it. We can’t possibly know this in gfx-hal without introducing overhead… So, at the end of the day, we decided that the “typed” (user-facing) layer is still useful, it doesn’t have to be a part of gfx-hal. Thus, we removed it, recommending rendy-command as a replacement. This slimmed up gfx-hal API surface and allowed us to straighten up the terminology (no more “RawXXX” or “XxxTyped”). https://gfx-rs.github.io/2019/10/01/update.html

WebGPU and portability

One of the goals of WebGPU that differentiates it from the other libraries and APIs is "strong" portability, in a sense that it not only runs on all targeted platforms, but also the performance expectations match. Therefore, if don't see a way to consistently implement a feature on at least 2 or the 3 target platforms, in such a way that it works and using it shows a difference, we don't include it in the core API. Take sub-passes, for example, that, while you can technically implement them on Metal and DX12 by doing separate passes, they only make a difference on Vulkan mobile GPUs today, so there can't be expectation that using sub-passes makes you magically faster. Take buffer capabilities as another example: if we expose all the queries about what is supported and what not, it's easy to write an application that would work on the developer platform but then break on others, because they possibly forgot to query, or simply don't have another code path in place. Finally, things like "multiple queues" are desired for the most part, but we haven't yet figured a plan on how to expose them portably, as in - without race conditions affecting the portability of user programs. https://github.com/nannou-org/nannou/issues/374#issuecomment-533841665

Misc

Shading Language

GLSL

Found the problem - I need to become a GLSL shader expert https://www.reddit.com/r/rust_gamedev/comments/be08e2/wgpu_pipeline_question/el40lsl/

HLSL

Google and Samsung are developing HLSL compiler for Vulkan, because a large majority of game studios don't want to bother with Vulkan on Android if they cannot port their shaders. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18439910

GLSL vs HLSL

My biggest concerns about using HLSL as the source are:

WSL (formerly WHLSL)

There are many Web developers using GLSL today in WebGL, so a potential browser accepting a different high level language, like HLSL, wouldn’t suit their needs well. In addition, a high-level language such as HLSL can’t be executed faithfully on every platform and graphics API that WebGPU is designed to execute on. https://webkit.org/blog/9528/webgpu-and-wsl-in-safari/

So, we decided to make the language more simple, low-level, and fast to compile, and renamed the language to Web Shading Language to match this pursuit.

CG

CG has been discontinued, and is no longer supported or actively worked on by Nvidia. Nvidia recommends that all users switch to a combination of GLSL and HLSL, or a newer library such as nvFX (on github). This is because it was too difficult to maintain feature-compatibility between GLSL and HLSL. https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/4234/what-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-hlsl-vs-glsl-vs-cg/4333#4333

OpenGL

License

CC0