What is WebGPU?

Modern web pages sometimes need heavy number-crunching, such as 3D graphics or machine-learning models, and a computer's graphics chip (GPU) is able to rapidly perform vast numbers of calculations. The older browser tool for this, WebGL, is based around drawing graphics and does not handle general-purpose GPU computation very well. WebGPU is a JavaScript programming interface that lets a web page use the device's GPU both to draw complex images and to run demanding computations, and it is the successor to WebGL. It was developed by the GPU for the Web community group, set up in February 2017 at the W3C, the organisation that standardizes WebGPU.

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