swiftshader VS wgpu-native

Is it really true that those bugs aren't getting fixed? There's a commit from July 18th to SwiftShader that seems to be addressing exactly the bug described in the blog post:

https://github.com/google/swiftshader/commit/4e401427f8dd799...

If your GPU does not support Vulkan you can still do some experimenting with a CPU renderer. I've used swiftshader a lot, it's a bit of a pain to compile, but once you manage to do so you can compile and run Vulkan code almost the same as if you had a compatible GPU. The performance of course is not great, but it's better than nothing.

swiftshader by Google (link):

You also don't get extensive support for various hardware for free – good luck running a Vulkan GUI on a pre-GCN AMD card or a sufficiently old NVIDIA one without a compatibility layer of sorts, which would require bothering with Vulkan Portability (i.e. missing certain Vulkan features due to it being implemented via an older API). The only alternative to that is SwiftShader (which would throw your extremely fast GUI aspirations right outta the window).

That's like saying no one needs a GPU anymore because Swiftshader exists.

Btw, if anyone's interested, here's the link to that branch: https://github.com/google/swiftshader/tree/legacy-d3d9

Yeah, there's still a fallback option through the use of Swiftshader if GPU accelerated vulkan isn't an option. If you use Vulkan for GUI, then it'll be fine to use Swiftshader, but if you're trying to play a game on Swiftshader, it'll likely struggle and probably fail.

The fix is https://github.com/flutter/engine/pull/25205 to use soft renderer SwiftShader instead of DXD9 on low-end PCs

Google’s version is SwiftShader

The Mach engine project has prebuilt Dawn libraries and also a simplified build-from-source process using the Zig build system, see:

https://machengine.org/pkg/mach-gpu-dawn/

It's also possible to use wgpu-native in C/C++ projects as prebuilt library, see:

https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu-native

It is based on the wgpu-native implementation (Firefox backend) but I plan on adding a receipe for using it with Dawn (Chrome backend) as well.

go-webgpu provides binding for wgpu-native (a safe and portable GPU abstraction in Rust, implementing WebGPU API).

Rust, C++

When you look at graphics APIs in Rust practically everything is pointing towards, and telling you to use, wgpu, which abstracts over Vulkan, Metal, DX11/12, GLES and WebGPU and is based on, drumroll, WebGPU. Hardly surprising as it's the backend firefox is going to use. And yes it has a C API, too.

Probably the easiest option would be to target wgpu-native prebuilt binaries but these don't have iOS/Android (unsure if wgpu-native supports iOS/Android at all)

WGPU is the underlying implementation for WebGPU in Firefox and it has C bindings: https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu-native.git.