WebGPU
WebGPU is a modern, low-level graphics and compute API for the web that provides direct access to GPU hardware, enabling high-performance rendering and parallel computation in web applications. It serves as a successor to WebGL, offering improved performance, better support for modern GPU features, and a more explicit, predictable programming model. WebGPU is designed to work across multiple platforms, including desktop and mobile browsers, and supports graphics rendering, machine learning, and general-purpose GPU computing tasks.
Developers should learn WebGPU when building web applications that require advanced graphics, real-time rendering, or GPU-accelerated computations, such as games, scientific visualizations, or AI inference in the browser. It is particularly useful for projects needing better performance and control than WebGL offers, as it reduces driver overhead and supports modern GPU architectures like Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX 12. Use cases include 3D web games, data visualization with complex shaders, and browser-based machine learning models that leverage GPU parallelism.