WebGPU in Chrome 155 and 156: The Two Features Worth Reading About

Chrome's WebGPU roundup for versions 155 and 156 is short on headlines and useful if you ship 3D on the web.

The one we would use first is the pair of new predefined canvas colour spaces, srgb-linear and display-p3-linear. They let the WebGPU canvas render straight into extended-range linear colour for wide-gamut displays. If you do your lighting in linear space, as you should, that removes a conversion step and a source of banding.

Second is texture-compression-unaligned. Compressed formats such as BC, ETC2 and ASTC need dimensions in multiples of the block size, so odd-sized textures had to be padded or scaled. The new feature allows unaligned sizes, which keeps the original fidelity without scaling distortion. Chrome credits an external contributor for the work.

A warning on the third. The fragment_depth WGSL extension, which lets you tell the GPU how written depth compares with interpolated depth so early-Z optimisation survives, is temporarily disabled on all platforms because of shader compilation errors on Windows. Feature-detect it and do not depend on it yet.

Bindless rendering is also available for early experimentation on Android, Linux and Windows, and Google links a demo.