Intent to Ship: WebGPU: Texture formats tier1 and tier2

[Chromestatus]

Contact emails

shanxi...@intel.com

Explainer

None

Specification

https://www.w3.org/TR/webgpu/#texture-formats-tier1

Summary

Extend GPU texture format support with capabilities like render attachment, blending, multisampling, resolve and storage_binding.

Blink component

Blink>WebGPU

Web Feature ID

webgpu

TAG review

None

TAG review status

Not applicable

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

None

Gecko: No signal (https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1205)

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

Web developers: Positive (https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/3837)

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

Debuggability

None

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

NoAll platforms will eventually have support. Will immediately be available on Android, Android WebView, ChromeOS, Mac, and Windows, since those platforms already support WebGPU. 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?

YesWebGPU/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. All the tests about this feature in WebGPU CTS can be found through https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Agpuweb%2Fcts+texture-formats-tier&type=code

Flag name on about://flags

Enable Unsafe WebGPU

Finch feature name

WebGPU.Enabled:UnsafeFeatures

Rollout plan

Will ship enabled for all users

Requires code in //chrome?

False

Tracking bug

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/445725447

Estimated milestones

Shipping on desktop	142
Shipping on Android	142
Shipping on WebView	142

Anticipated spec changes

Open questions about a feature may be a source of future web compat or interop issues. Please list open issues (e.g. links to known github issues in the project for the feature specification) whose resolution may introduce web compat/interop risk (e.g., changing to naming or structure of the API in a non-backward-compatible way). None

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/5116926821007360?gate=5198559351799808

This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.

[Mike Taylor]

LGTM1

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[Dan Clark]

As someone less familiar with this area I'm having a hard time understanding what this is for.

Could you share more context about this addition and the use cases motivating it, or even better, put together a short explainer doc that does so?

-- Dan

[François Beaufort]

Here's the mini explainer from the chrome status entry motivation section:

Tier1 lets developers port existing content to the web without rewriting to use
WebGPU’s lower capabilities. Tier2 supports storage textures formats that don't
have support in base WebGPU, meet the need for Unity and various startups to
port Unreal Engine to the Web. Tier1 is a dependency of Tier2.

By exposing those capabilities as WebGPU features, developers can explicitly
check for support and provide fallback solutions or alternative rendering paths
when necessary.

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[Daniel Bratell]

I don't think the Web Developer link below counts as proof of web developer support. I assume there is someone that wants this or you wouldn't be doing this?

On the other hand, I read the WebKit bug as positive rather than "no comment" so there is that. :)

/Daniel

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[François Beaufort]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2025 at 8:59 PM Daniel Bratell <brat...@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't think the Web Developer link below counts as proof of web developer support. I assume there is someone that wants this or you wouldn't be doing this?

You're right! We're moving forward because there is clear demand.
The texture-formats-tier1 feature capabilities have been a topic of discussion for years.
See https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/3001#issue-1257513985 or https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/2630 for instance.

On the other hand, I read the WebKit bug as positive rather than "no comment" so there is that. :)

Indeed. WebKit has already started the implementation: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/commit/316fd532cc8e1a65c4a0735f2d7c70a2f6de894e

[Alex Russell]

LGTM2; thanks for explaining. In future it would be great if these had explainers.

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[Yoav Weiss (@Shopify)]

LGTM3