WebGPU and VR/AR/Metaverse/ecommerce applications

Questions
1

Hello, I’m a VR developer and just launched a web design agency. I’ve been researching webGPU. I think it may solve many of the performance issues and limitations I’ve encountered with webGL. We are looking to incorporate more lifelike VR scenes on our websites especially for ecommerce/Metaverse applications. I’ve been using Unity Engine but I’m hoping to see Unreal Engine 5 support webGPU because of thier nanite technology.

I realize webGPU is still inferior to native GPU rendering, but I was wondering if anyone has an idea about how hard I can push webGPU before getting major performance issues? Any information or estimates on poly counts, frame rates, ray tracing, post processing capabilities, vr performance etc would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

2

Hi @Ty_Carton and welcome to the forum.

It highly depends on your GPU, shader complexity,…Maybe @Evgeni_Popov has some insights.

3

In Babylon.js, you can get better performance, depending on your scene, by using snapshot rendering or fast path mode.

A major improvement in WebGPU is the support for compute shaders, which does not exist in WebGL2. If you are able to take advantage of this, it could make a big difference.

Note that ray tracing may come to WebGPU someday, but not in the short term (or even medium term) and that WebXR is not yet supported.

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