Dawn / Chromium status updates for the last couple months

[Corentin Wallez]

Hey all,

I stopped sending biweekly status updates because it took a lot of time to do and I'm not sure what the value is. That said I just sent this update to the group that encompasses the last couple months of work in Dawn / Chromium WebGPU. Let me know if you think these are useful and what frequency would be interesting for you.

Some rough status updates from the Chromium / Dawn side for the couple months:

• Kai contributed the first version of the CTS harness in the gpuweb/cts repo with some minimal tests that don't use shaders for now. We'll send an email with more details about it shortly.
• We contributed the initial version of a webgpu.h header in a new webgpu-native org for use with emscriptem and making Mozilla's and Google's implementations interoperable (Corentin)
• Implementation on other OSes is ongoing, with a first prototype getting HelloTriangle on the screen on Linux (Idan) and progress on the Windows version as well (Rafael)
• Progress on making buffer mapping use shared memory between Chromium's renderer process and GPU process (instead of doing N memcpies) (Austin)
• Implementation of many features in Dawn (some already exposed in Blink) with decent test coverage:
• Dynamic buffer offset (Shaobo)
• Compressed textures (Jiawei)
• CW/CCW, viewport, scissor and culling (Yunchao)
• Texture lazy clearing on creation (Natasha)
• CreateBufferMapped (Austin)
• All color texture formats (Corentin)
• Progress on using a buddy allocator for GPU memory in the D3D12 and Vulkan backends of Dawn (Bryan)
• Running Dawn commit tests with D3D12 / Metal / Vulkan's validation layers (Hao)

Also Intel recently open-sourced a native version of the Aquarium WebGL benchmark that works on many APIs including Dawn (Yizhou). My understanding is that it will be possible to WASM it to use WebGPU and benchmark against native easily.

Cheers,

Corentin