bevy VS wgpu

Most of Nanite (at least, everything but the LOD system, I haven't tried that part, and the compute rasterizer due to lack of storage image atomics because Metal lacks them...) is implementable in WebGPU actually.

I have a PR that does a lot of the same things (meshlets, visbuffer, material depth, two pass occlusion culling) open for Bevy https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/10164 that I've been working on, which uses WebGPU.

WebGPU is actually a pretty good API imo. It's missing some advanced features like raytracing, mesh shaders, and subgroup operations (coming soon!), but it can still do a lot.

The much bigger missing feature is "bindless" support (non-uniform arrays of bound resources). BindGroup overhead (and ergonomics) is a significant downside.

ECS architectures are used in a number of young open source game engines, such as Bevy[1]. I haven't done game development for a long time, but hearing about an architecture that does away with the heavy and complex OOP you often see in games makes me want to dip my toes in again and check it out.

[1]: https://bevyengine.org/

https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/main/examples/shader...

Yup! The Bevy Editor is our current highest priority. The first step is building out a new Scene / UI system that will serve as the foundation for the editor (as the Bevy Editor will be built as a Bevy App).

I have a post about this (with working prototypes) here: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/discussions/9538

This is something that can certainly happen. In fact, this is exactly what happened with the Bevy engine, in which a total of 246 contributors agreed to relicense the engine, as explained in this blog post. However, in this case it was done for the good of the engine and its users.

If you are using Rust, you should check out https://bevyengine.org which is a rust based game engine with a focus on ECS

I was crowing to my game dev buddy about how he (a Unity C-sharp developer) ought to check out Bevy and Rust because the Rust type system is friggin’ awesome!

Code examples: https://bevyengine.org/learn/book/getting-started/ecs/

License is Apache 2.0 OR MIT:

https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/main/LICENSE-APACHE

https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/main/LICENSE-MIT

For those who are more code centric and like rust, https://bevyengine.org/ is a good alternative to godot as far as open source goes.

wgpu, the Rust WebGPU implementation is the bee's knees. https://wgpu.rs/ You can use it beyond the web.

There is anything like wgpu.rs for Zig? wgpu.rs is an abstraction on top of Vulkan, Metal, DirectX, etc...

dawn is the WebGPU backend in chromium, while wgpu is the WebGPU backend for firefox written in Rust. wgpu is seeing a lot of use in non-browser uses; there are some examples on their website.

https://wgpu.rs/

Funnily enough, we've never actually been on WebGL! The runtime's built against wgpu [0], which is an abstraction layer that supports the native rendering APIs, WebGPU, and yes, WebGL.

However, our renderer was built with native capabilities in mind (compute shaders!), so we would have had to rewrite it to support WebGL. We decided we'd keep up with WebGPU and see where it takes us :)

In the future, we may write a fallback renderer that's compatible with WebGL/older GPUs, but we wanted to focus on getting our existing renderer working first.

[0]: https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu

The WGPU people have a new, faster version coming out and Firefox integration is in progress.[1]

[1] https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/pull/3626#issuecomment-173417...

I double checked, and our rendering library _does_ partially supports DX11, as well as Angle, which lets you run the GLES3 backend on top of Angle on top of GLES2/DX11. They tend to be fairly buggy and incomplete, though. Arguably only usable for simple 2D games.

There's been no real demand or contributors to improve it, but it's open source so there's no reason you or anyone else could stamp out the bugs https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu#supported-platforms.

It's become rather popular in the graphics (e.g. https://wgpu.rs/) and game dev (e.g. https://bevyengine.org/ ) spaces.

It's pretty popular for AWS Lambda functions.

Pretty popular for terminal / shell applications.

Definitely a great way to write wasm for compute or graphics intensive browser/web apps.

wgpu: Follows the WebGPU API and focuses on WebGL/WebGPU.