Intent to Ship: WebGPU: 1-component vertex formats (and unorm8x4-bgra)

[Corentin Wallez]

Contact emails

cwa...@google.com

Explainer

None

Specification

https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/pull/4951

Summary

Adds additional vertex formats not present in the initial release of WebGPU due to lack of support or old macOS versions (which are no longer supported by any browser). The 1-component vertex formats lets applications request only the necessary data when previously they had to request at least 2x more for 8 and 16-bit data types. The unorm8x4-bgra format makes it slightly more convenient to load BGRA-encoded vertex colors while keeping the same shader.

Blink component

Blink>WebGPU

TAG review

None

TAG review status

Not applicable

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

This feature has been approved in W3C GPU for the Web WG meetings including participants from Safari and Firefox. https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/4549#issuecomment-2044859355

Gecko: No signal Mozilla members have approved <link to the PR, or tracking issue> and requested during weekly standardization meetings that we postpone filing standard positions until we reach Candidate Recommendation (CR) status in Q4.

WebKit: Closed Without a Position (https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/294#issuecomment-1877411933)

Web developers: Positive (https://x.com/SebAaltonen/status/1856361670437646622)

Other signals:

WebView application risks

Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?

None

Goals for experimentation

Ongoing technical constraints

None

Debuggability

None

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and Android WebView)?

No

All platforms will eventually have support. Will immediately be available on Android, Android WebView, ChromeOS, Mac, and Windows, where hardware support is available. Linux is planned to have WebGPU support in the future, so this feature will become available when WebGPU does.

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?

Yes

WebGPU/WGSL have a conformance test suite (https://github.com/gpuweb/cts) that is regularly pulled into Chromium and part of the testing of Dawn/Tint in Chromium. While the CTS can be embedded in WPT, the WebGPU team opted to keep it separate in Chromium testing to use a customized harness for robustness and performance. https://github.com/gpuweb/cts/pull/4029

Flag name on about://flags

None

Finch feature name

WebGPUOneComponentVertexFormats

Requires code in //chrome?

False

Tracking bug

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/376924407

Estimated milestones

No milestones specified

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/4609840973086720

This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.

[Yoav Weiss (@Shopify)]

LGTM1

[Alex Russell]

LGTM2

[Chris Harrelson]

LGTM3

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "blink-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to blink-dev+...@chromium.org.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/ac1f86d0-3a7c-447f-a771-d540f2512f59n%40chromium.org.

[Corentin Wallez]

Thanks all!