Will 'WebGL' be replaced by 'WebGPU' in the future?

785597448 · September 15, 2026, 6:21am

Will ‘WebGL’ be replaced by ‘WebGPU’ in the future?

785597448 · September 15, 2026, 6:22am

When will “openfl” add support for “webGPU”?

785597448 · September 15, 2026, 6:26am

As far as I know, ‘Unity’ no longer supports’ WebGL 1.0 '!

Bink · September 15, 2026, 9:53pm

Adoption for WebGPU is still a work in progress, for now requiring user intervention to enable on Safari and Firefox. No surprise, the Chromium based browsers have it available already, but even then support is OS and driver dependant as well.

https://caniuse.com/webgpu

WebGL 2.0 (supported in Lime) has wide browser support so it’s not especially surprising Unity are stepping away from WebGL 1.0.

https://caniuse.com/webgl2

I can’t speak authoritatively to WebGPU’s future in Lime, that’s up to the development team. I suspect if there are folk willing and able to implement it though, it likely would be.

Bink · September 15, 2026, 11:09pm

Expose WebGPU in Lime

opened 09:43AM - 09 Apr 25 UTC

Fancy2209

In a way a follow up issue to https://github.com/openfl/lime/issues/754 I guess?… Opened this for discussion and tracking, as I feel this should be discussed People have been asking for a modern Graphics API, WebGPU will allow for this more easily than other options because: - Doesn't depend on one specific Windowing library (like SDL GPU only working with SDL3 even tho we still have some SDL2 only targets like WinRT and I guess ) - Works on Browsers without worrying about it only working on WASM, and works on native trough either Dawn and WGPU-Native that abstract over Vulkan, Metal and D3D12 - Works on Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, macOS and HTML5, and we could probably find a way to get it working trough offscreen My current plan is to use wgpu-native instead of Dawn because: 1. Easier to integrate 2. It isn't made by Google 3. It has been battle tested, WGPU is used in Firefox, Servo, Deno and Ruffle WebGPU will provide some issues though: - Context3D is pretty much made for OpenGL, I have no idea if we can realistically implement it well with WebGPU - WGPU-Native has support for taking in GLSL, WGSL and SPIR-V, WebGPU on JS only takes WGSL, so I may need to find a way to compile Naga as a WASM library and expose it to JS for GLSL. Naga (WebGPU Shader Compiler) also can only take GLSL 4.4 in, not sure if that'll be an issue - WebGPU is on a very breaking period First step will be exposing WebGPU on lime by adding a WebGPU rendering context for Web and Native, there has been some work on this, as @dimensionscape has been working on a bindings generator based on the yml the WebGPU C Headers are made from.