WebGPU
WebGPU is the modern browser graphics and compute API built on Vulkan, Metal, and Direct3D 12, offering lower overhead and compute shaders that WebGL2 lacks.
Also known as WGPU, WebGPU API
Measured by SystemCheck
Part of the four-stage run: a 60-second sustained CPU load reporting throughput, decay and consistency; a memory stage reporting bandwidth and latency; a calibrated GPU raster load reporting frame time, pacing and decay; and a path tracer reporting samples per second. The paragraphs below say which metric carries this term.
WebGPU maps closely onto modern explicit native APIs. Pipelines and bind groups are created up front, command buffers are recorded explicitly, and the runtime does far less per-call validation. The result is substantially lower CPU overhead and much better behaviour on draw-call-heavy scenes.
For measurement, the big addition is compute shaders and storage buffers. Workloads such as path tracing map far more naturally onto WebGPU than onto WebGL2's fragment-shader workarounds, so both absolute performance and result stability improve.
SystemCheck prefers WebGPU when the browser exposes it and falls back to WebGL2 otherwise, recording the backend in every report. The same GPU can post a meaningfully higher result on WebGPU than on WebGL2, so always check the backend field before comparing two reports. WebGPU still exposes no temperatures, no VRAM size, and no power data. That limitation is a deliberate part of the web security model, not something a future browser version will lift.
Related terms