gfx VS wgpu-rs

Compare gfx vs wgpu-rs and see what are their differences.

gfx

[maintenance mode] A low-overhead Vulkan-like GPU API for Rust. (by gfx-rs)

wgpu-rs

Rust bindings to wgpu native library (by gfx-rs)
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gfx wgpu-rs
11 16
5,325 1,699
0.2% -
0.0 9.0
about 1 year ago almost 3 years ago
Rust Rust
Apache License 2.0 Mozilla Public License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

gfx

Posts with mentions or reviews of gfx. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-03-25.
  • How to learn writing a Wayland compositor?
    6 projects | /r/rust | 25 Mar 2023
    Understand Wayland concepts: Familiarize yourself with the basic concepts and principles of Wayland. This will help you gain a solid understanding of how the system works. You can refer to the official Wayland documentation (https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/) and the Wayland book (https://wayland-book.com/). Learn Rust: If you're not already proficient in Rust, take some time to learn the language. The Rust Book (https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/) is a great place to start. Study existing Wayland compositors: Since you mentioned Anvil and smallvil, you can study their source code to gain insights into how they're designed and implemented. Try to understand the structure and how different components interact with each other. Dive into Smithay: Smithay (https://github.com/Smithay/smithay) is a Rust library for building Wayland compositors. Familiarize yourself with the library and its components. You can start by studying the provided examples and reading the API documentation. Learn graphics programming: Since you're interested in graphics effects, you'll need to learn about graphics programming concepts, such as shaders, framebuffers, and texturing. Vulkan (https://www.vulkan.org/) is a popular graphics API that you can use with Rust. Check out the following resources to learn more about Vulkan and graphics programming in Rust: Vulkan Tutorial (https://vulkan-tutorial.com/) gfx-rs (https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx), a Rust graphics library Vulkano (https://github.com/vulkano-rs/vulkano), a safe, pure-Rust wrapper around the Vulkan API Start small: Break down the compositor project into smaller, manageable tasks. Begin by implementing basic functionality, like setting up a window and drawing simple shapes. Gradually add more features, such as input handling and window management. Ask for help: Join the Wayland and Rust communities to ask questions and seek advice. You can find them on forums, mailing lists, and chat platforms like Discord or IRC. The Wayland mailing list (https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/wayland-devel) and the Rust programming subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/) are good places to start. Iterate and experiment: As you progress, keep experimenting with different graphics effects and shaders. Try to implement the features you're interested in, such as blur, window previews, and window switching.
  • Language for game engine
    5 projects | /r/GraphicsProgramming | 2 Jan 2022
  • WGPU vs Vulkan?
    2 projects | /r/rust_gamedev | 11 Aug 2021
    From https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx
  • Graphics Libraries?
    5 projects | /r/rust_gamedev | 3 Jun 2021
    https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx#hardware-abstraction-layer
  • Wgpu: Copies into 3D images are not supported
    2 projects | /r/rust_gamedev | 17 Apr 2021
    Searching through the source code for wgpu and its dependencies, the error is coming from the gfx-rs DirectX 11 backend. I am guessing this is because of a limitation of DirectX 11. The easiest thing to do would probably be to try switching to the DirectX 12 or Vulkan backends.
  • I built a simple C8 emulator/debugger/disassembler (Rust)
    3 projects | /r/EmuDev | 1 Apr 2021
    Looks like they are using https://github.com/ggez/ggez which in turn uses https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx for low-level drawing to the screen
  • OpenGL in Rust
    4 projects | /r/rust | 22 Feb 2021
    There is also gfx-rs, which should be easier to use than opengl.
  • Ask HN: How to self-learn graphics programming?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Feb 2021
    https://crates.io/crates/tiny-skia

    You can put things together pretty easily with these libs. And they also let you skip the gpu boilerplate (I should note that tiny-skia works only in the CPU).

    Lastly, you have shader programming (OpenGL, Vulkan, etc.). If you're writing "production code" you'll have to do some setting up of the GPU, and the actual graphics code will be in a separate shader language. Shader languages are similar to C but with restrictions that allow for a high level of parallism, making it extremely fast. If you want to get started with this I'd recommend playing around on a site like shadertoy[1] where you can start writing shaders right away. I haven't done much of this myself but as far as Rust goes I've seen a lot of references to the gfx crate:

    https://crates.io/crates/gfx

    I hope this helps

    [1] https://www.shadertoy.com/

wgpu-rs

Posts with mentions or reviews of wgpu-rs. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-04-30.
  • gfx-rs ecosystem releases v0.8
    3 projects | /r/rust | 30 Apr 2021
    Naga-based shader infrastructure has been growing and capturing more ground. It has reached an important point where SPIRV-Cross is not just optional on some platforms, but even not enabled by default. This is now the case for Metal and OpenGL backends. Naga path is easier to integrate, share types with, compile, and it’s much faster to run. Early benchmarks suggest about 2.5x perf improvement over SPIRV-Cross for us.
    3 projects | /r/rust | 30 Apr 2021
    wgpu-rs (https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu-rs) is probably closer to what you're looking for, it's a "high level wrapper" over wgpu-core (Which implements "WebGPU", an upcoming browser API for graphics using gfx-rs, and AIUI "implements" means this is what a browser might use to actually call a graphics API when javascript uses webGPU, although if you're compiling for wasm it could just call the browser APIs). It can run natively, ignore the fact it has "Web" in the name
  • GPU compute shader for SHA256 using Rust!
    3 projects | /r/rust | 25 Apr 2021
    rust-gpu) is used for compiling a compute shader written in Rust to SPIR-V. wgpu-rs is used natively for running the GPU computation.
  • GPU programming .. SYCL
    2 projects | /r/rust | 15 Apr 2021
  • Bevy 0.5
    14 projects | /r/rust | 6 Apr 2021
    For web assembly there is the unofficial bevy_webgl2 plugin. Official bevy web assembly support would probably use the wgpu webgl backend, which still needs some work, and is currently untested in bevy.
  • Bevy 0.5: data oriented game engine built in Rust
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Apr 2021
    We let wgpu https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu-rs handle our graphics backend abstraction, so our OpenGL support will come whenever they implement and release it. Currently, it seems to be a WIP.
  • Last big wgpu-rs example shaders are fully ported to WGSL now, and validated in it
    6 projects | /r/rust_gamedev | 30 Mar 2021
    Same as with GLSL, isn't it? What we do in wgpu-rs examples, and that's something I expect to see more widely, is having an integration test that just parses all the WGSL in the project and reports errors. Ideally though, we'd have a set of IDE plugins to do the parsing and report errors right where you type the code. We'd appreciate any help to get these started!
    6 projects | /r/rust_gamedev | 30 Mar 2021
  • Newbie questions on design patterns in Rust
    2 projects | /r/rust_gamedev | 21 Mar 2021
    Also you could use an existing cross-platform graphics library, e.g. wgpu-rs. It supports Vulkan, Metal, DirectX, OpenGL and WebGPU. Oh and it seems to allow switching backends at compile-time via the WGPU_BACKEND environment variable, so maybe check out how they're doing it.
  • OpenGL in Rust
    4 projects | /r/rust | 22 Feb 2021
    there is a lack of opengl development because opengl itself is beint phased out slowly. your best bet here is probably https://wgpu.rs

What are some alternatives?

When comparing gfx and wgpu-rs you can also consider the following projects:

glium - Safe OpenGL wrapper for the Rust language.

ash - Vulkan bindings for Rust

wgpu - Cross-platform, safe, pure-rust graphics api.

glutin - A low-level library for OpenGL context creation, written in pure Rust.

kiss3d - Keep it simple, stupid 3d graphics engine for Rust.

awesome-bevy - A collection of Bevy assets, plugins, learning resources, and apps made by the community

bevy_webgl2 - WebGL2 renderer plugin for Bevy game engine

rust-gpu - πŸ‰ Making Rust a first-class language and ecosystem for GPU shaders 🚧

rusttype - Mirror of https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/rusttype

printpdf - An easy-to-use library for writing PDF in Rust

gpuweb - Where the GPU for the Web work happens!

hash-shader - SHA256 WebGPU Compute Shader (Kernel) Written in Rust