WebGPU: Comparing Parallelism Over Serial Execution in Web Graphics
摘要
With ever-increasing use of the internet, web applications have become attractive. This is because web applications offer zero installation and a portable interface across several devices. From E-Commerce, banking systems and content management systems to video editing, file storage, remote terminals, video conferencing and scientific computations, webapps are more featureful than ever. Traditional web apps could not support graphics intensive applications like 3D modelling, gaming and simulation. Such applications typically require an additional hardware device called GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) to accelerate graphics. WebGL, a web abstraction of the OpenGL library, was the first attempt to overcome this inability and enabled accelerated graphics on browsers. WebGPU, the successor of WebGL, provides additional features when compared to WebGL. In this work, WebGPU is described. The marching cubes algorithm is run using the CPU intensive Ring of Staging Buffer technique and then parallelised using the GPU accelerated Compute Shader method. Observations from these two techniques are compared. The results show that WebGPU provides significantly greater performance (nearly 6 times better) compared to serial execution.