WebGPU Support Begins Coming Together In Firefox Nightly Builds

[phoronix]

Phoronix: WebGPU Support Begins Coming Together In Firefox Nightly Builds

The latest Firefox Nightly builds have the experimental WebGPU support working in early form. WebGPU is the W3C-backed web standard for modern graphics and compute that is based upon concepts from the likes of Vulkan and Direct3D 12...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-WebGPU-Working-Nightly

[TemplarGR]

Tried the latest nightly today myself. It is simply awesome. It is fast, stable, and fully hardware accelerated! This is becoming a huge selling point for Wayland. If you are on GNOME and Wayland, Firefox is simply better than Chrome now.

[andrei_me]

Tried the latest nightly today myself. It is simply awesome.

I use nightly as my daily browser for +5y, it is pretty stable, barely have a crash and if it does, usually it is fixed in less than a week, I always recommend others to use it instead of stable Firefox

[Danny3]

I like to play games, but not the amateur type in the browser.
For the browser, I would be much more happy if it would have good video and audio hardware acceleration, including surround sound like 5.1 and 7.1
I think they should take a sample video 4K @ 60 FPS and work on that to make the browser as optimized as possible for decoding it.
But yeah, it's good that they calmed down on the VR front and decided to work more on more useful stuff.

[M@GOid]

Meanwhile people still dreaming of video hardware acceleration...
I find it baffling that for shit nobody asks there are plenty of resources available, but for shit people really want is just one guy.

BTW, on Windows, video acceleration is working on both Firefox and Chrome. On Linux Google refuses patches to make it work. Mozilla makes it obligatory to use Wayland. Yay...

[vegabook]

Meanwhile people still dreaming of video hardware acceleration...
I find it baffling that for shit nobody asks there are plenty of resources available, but for shit people really want is just one guy.

BTW, on Windows, video acceleration is working on both Firefox and Chrome. On Linux Google refuses patches to make it work. Mozilla makes it obligatory to use Wayland. Yay...

This issue is particularly bad on ARM architectures. Firefox is completely unusable on an RPI or a Jetson Nano for video, whereas Chromium works fine.

[TemplarGR]

Meanwhile people still dreaming of video hardware acceleration...
I find it baffling that for shit nobody asks there are plenty of resources available, but for shit people really want is just one guy.

BTW, on Windows, video acceleration is working on both Firefox and Chrome. On Linux Google refuses patches to make it work. Mozilla makes it obligatory to use Wayland. Yay...

Well, Wayland is just the future. Why wouldn't you want to use Wayland?

[bug77]

I was going to ask what's WebGPU next to WebGL. But it's explained on the page from Mozilla: WebGL wasn't complex enough, so they turned it up a notch.

Well, Wayland is just the future. Why wouldn't you want to use Wayland?

You're just a dog with a bone, aren't you?

[kvark]

Google's Chrome team has been leading on their WebGPU development work but it looks like Mozilla isn't far behind with the Firefox Nightly builds beginning to run Google's demos and other samples.

Those "other samples" are compiled to WASM directly from Rust.

Moreover, in some ways Firefox implementation is more complete than Chrome's: we can run the "mipmap" and the "shadow" examples, while Chrome still has internal changes to catch up. In other ways, like validation-wise, we are behind for sure.

Also worth noting that Firefox's WebGPU implementation is based on the same gfx-rs stack that the Vulkan Portability implementation in gfx-portability, which shows up here from time to time.

[QwertyChouskie]

Meanwhile people still dreaming of video hardware acceleration...
I find it baffling that for shit nobody asks there are plenty of resources available, but for shit people really want is just one guy.

BTW, on Windows, video acceleration is working on both Firefox and Chrome. On Linux Google refuses patches to make it work. Mozilla makes it obligatory to use Wayland. Yay...

There's active work to bring these same improvements to XOrg, the first step (supporting desktop OGL on EGL builds) was recently merged.

You can follow https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1580166 for more details as things come along.