I’ve been using three.webgpu.js for a while now for a little 3D first-person game scene I’m developing, mostly in Chrome, which has good WebGPU support. Firefox just falls back to WebGL when using three.webgpu.js. I’m using three.webgpu.js so I can write my shaders in TSL.
Most of my development work is tested in Chrome, and I will occasionally switch to Firefox to see how my scene renders with Firefox’s WebGL fallback.
Firefox’s WebGL renderer surprisingly has been keeping up great with Chrome’s WebGPU renderer, with no noticeable slowdown at all, even though WebGPU is supposed to be more powerful, etc.
Today, however, I was curious to know how my game would render and play in Chrome if I were to force Chrome to use WebGL, just like Firefox does. Thankfully there is an easy way to do this with the forceWebGL option passed to the WebGPURenderer constructor.
What I found was that my game runs terribly slow with the three.webgpu.js library when using the forceWebGL option in Chrome. In Firefox, my game runs silky smooth, even with WebGL.
Before I post the specifics of my setup, scene creation logic, etc, is there anything off the top of your heads that you think might be causing slowdown with the forceWebGL option in Chrome compared to Firefox?