zig-gamedev VS wgpu

Two game frameworks in the making: https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev & https://github.com/hexops/mach

I did a hangman game, I'm doing a file compression tool next. I asked bing chat to recommend beginner projects for zig and that's what it told me. It also suggested a cli calculator and a cli text editor, but I didn't want to do that. My next thing will be something using https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev

This repo may be useful. It isn't an engine or a renderer, but rather a collection of useful libraries if you do end up writing your own tools. https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev

Something like vulkano in Rust or zig-gamedev in zig might be a much more enjoyable approach: They're similarly bare metal languages but have a lot of advantages over C++ (borrow checker's safety, simpler syntax). However, they're not commonly used by big studios.

I've been working on a gamedev project in zig, using zig-gamedev. It has many libraries you can use, though my game is 2D. Feel free to check out my project if you want to see how I set things up. https://github.com/foxnne/aftersun

that's an exciting feature to have available, as raytracing hardware is now in mobile iGPUs and phones.

There is a tracking issue[1], although I ma not sure how much of that makes it to the browser.

[1] https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/issues/6762

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.