WebGPU Texture -> Babylon Texture without offload to CPU

Questions
1

All-
I am working on a WebGPU project which solves a set of PDE’s for ocean waves (2D horizontal Navier-Stokes type model), and would like to bring in Babylon viz capabilities. If interested, here is the project:

https://plynett.github.io/ [click Run Example Simulation to get an idea]

I have brought Babylon into the project, and can render simple 2d textures in a WebGPUEngine, e.g.

var txState_image = new BABYLON.Texture("./renderedImage.jpg", scene);
customMaterial.setTexture("textureSampler", txState_image);

My issue is that I am unable to figure out a way to get WebGPU texture data to the Babylon engine without first bringing the WebGPU texture data back to the CPU. This is of course a huge performance bottleneck.

For example, I have the WebGPU texture “txWaveState” created with the function pasted below. In some perfect world I would be able to:
var txState_image = new BABYLON.Texture(txWaveState, scene);

  • or -
    customMaterial.setTexture(“textureSampler”, txWaveState);
  • or -
    set a GPUTextureUsage flag to open the texture up to Babylon.

I will say that I am quite inexperienced when it comes to this type of programming config (I am an old school fortran guy), and so if I have missed something obvious or this is naive, please tell me what to read.

I probably need to stay in the native WebGPU texture / shader environment here, as in the end compute performance is more important than viz.

Thanks!
-Pat

export function create_2D_Texture(device, width, height) {
return device.createTexture({
size: [width, height, 1],
format: ‘rgba32float’,
usage: GPUTextureUsage.STORAGE_BINDING | GPUTextureUsage.COPY_SRC | GPUTextureUsage.COPY_DST | GPUTextureUsage.RENDER_ATTACHMENT | GPUTextureUsage.TEXTURE_BINDING
});
}

2

Welcome aboard!

To understand your problem: you are doing some computation in WebGPU but not with Babylon, and you would like to retrieve/reuse the (GPU) generated texture in Babylon? There’s currently no way to do it, but you normally should be able to do your WebGPU computation directly in Babylon, so the texture would already be a Babylon object that you could reuse anywhere. Is it possible for you?

3

Thanks @Evgeni_Popov. Yes, this is exactly the case. Your suggestion was what I figured, but thought maybe there was a workaround. There are some applications of this where linking to external libraries may be not allowed, which would be an issue with a Babylon rewrite of the compute pipeline. But, because it would be awesomely better to look at, I will try to convert to Babylon and see how it goes. Thanks!