wgpu VS glow

People have already mentioned Metal, but if you want cross platform, https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu has a vulkan-like API and cross compiles to all the various GPU frameworks. I believe it uses https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK to run on Macs. You can also see the metal shader transpilation results for debugging.

This is in reference to [1].

[1] https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/issues/6434

> Did they actually write that somewhere?

wgpu.rs for comments about "general purpose", "modern" is my own interjection, and [1] about the difference in priorities between the WGPU maintainers and (funnily enough) you.

I do believe a cross-platform and modern interface is difficult to square with high performance. I don't think either side is wrong to choose the priorities it has, but someone will be underserved. They probably need far more manpower/talent than they have to improve performance proportionately.

[1] https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/discussions/5525

Sorry, I'll try to be clearer. QRhi docs[1] say "The Qt Rendering Hardware Interface is an abstraction for hardware accelerated graphics APIs, such as, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Direct3D, Metal, and Vulkan." And PySide6 includes a (python) wrapper for QRhi[2]. Meanwhile, pygfx builds on wgpu-py[3] which builds on wgpu[4] which is a "is a cross-platform, safe, pure-rust graphics API. It runs natively on Vulkan, Metal, D3D12, and OpenGL".

So, from the standpoint of someone using PySide6, QRhi and pygfx seem to be alternative paths to the exact same underlying graphics APIs.

Thus my question: How do they compare? How should I make an informed comparison between them?

[1] https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qrhi.html

[2] https://doc.qt.io/qtforpython-6/PySide6/QtWidgets/QRhiWidget...

[3] https://github.com/pygfx/wgpu-py/

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

Everything will be using compute shaders for the foreseeable future. [WGPU](https://wgpu.rs/) abstracts that to work with WebGPU on browsers, DirectX/Vulkan on Windows, Metal on Mac, and Vulkan on Linux and Android. There may be opportunities to explore vendor-specific options like CUDA in the far future to leverage a further increase in performance, but compute shaders are portable and nearly as good.

Instead of building their GPU support atop CUDA/NVIDIA [0], I’m wondering why they didn’t instead go with WebGPU [1] via something like wgpu [2]. Using wgpu, they could offer cross-platform compatibility across several graphics API’s, covering a wide range of hardware including NVIDIA GeForce and Quadro, AMD Radeon, Intel Iris and Arc, ARM Mali, and Apple’s integrated GPU’s.

They note the following [0]:

> The GPU module is under active development. APIs and semantics might change between Codon releases.

The thing is, based on the current syntax and semantics I see, it’ll almost certainly need to change to support non-NVIDIA devices, so I think it might be a better idea to just go with WebGPU compute pipelines sooner rather than later.

Just my two pennies…

[0]: https://docs.exaloop.io/codon/advanced/gpu

[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/webgpu

[2]: https://wgpu.rs

wgpu supports WebGPU: https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu :

> While WebGPU does not support any shading language other than WGSL, we will automatically convert your non-WGSL shaders if you're running on WebGPU.

https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu?tab=readme-ov-file#tracking-t...

I just opened https://github.com/grovesNL/glow/pull/331 to do exactly that.

You can absolutely do WebGL. glow is a good place if you want to do the webgl stuff yourself. With wgpu you can as well, though it is mostly targeted to the upcoming WebGPU standard. I have seen many crates that are capable of gltf loading, but I haven't used any yet. Hence I can't reall recommend one. But gltf capability does not really have anything to do with rust. As long as you can read a file and translate it to your engines scene/entity structure, I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to load gltf files.

Most of it is written in Rust and compiles to Wasm with WebGL/OpenGL bindings via glow. The settings panel is written in Elm and the whole project is compiled with Nix. There’s also a very basic native desktop app. I haven’t seen many examples of a complete setup like this, so hopefully this can serve as a template for anyone trying out a similar stack.

If you want to target desktop, mobile and/or web: https://github.com/grovesNL/glow

A/B Street, which comprises a UI library, lots of data import pipelines, and traffic simulation. 100k LoC, the only unafe is to make system calls through glow

https://github.com/grovesNL/glow/blob/main/examples/howto/src/main.rs :)

https://github.com/grovesNL/glow is used by wgpu for its OpenGL ES / WebGL backend

By the way, nowadays many projects use glow instead of glutin because of.. I think it's because glow works on wasm, in the web (as webgl).

But what glow actually does is highlighted on lines 66 to 123. This section is filled with gl.some_function() calls, which is the same on every platform.