A Comparison of Performance on WebGPU and WebGL in the Godot Game Engine

WebGL has been the standard API for rendering graphics on the web over the years. A new technology, WebGPU, has been set to release in 2023 and utilizes many of the novel rendering approaches and features common for the native modern graphics APIs, such as Vulkan. Currently, very limited research exists regarding WebGPU's rasterization capabilities. In particular, no research exists about its capabilities when used as a rendering backend in game engines. This paper aims to investigate performance differences between WebGL and WebGPU. It is done in the context of the game engine Godot, and the measured performance is that of the CPU and GPU frame time. The results show that WebGPU performs better than WebGL when used as a rendering backend in Godot, for both the games tests and the synthetic tests. The comparisons clearly show that WebGPU performs faster in mean CPU and GPU frame time.