WWDC 2025 - WebGPU on Apple Platforms

WebGPU brings Metal-level performance to Safari across all Apple platforms with a near one-to-one API mapping, eliminating translation overhead and enabling general-purpose GPU computing in browsers. WebGPU maps directly to the Metal framework, unlike WebGL's OpenGL legacy. The platform supports macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS with a native Metal backend, and third-party libraries like ThreeJS and Babylon.js already support WebGPU. WebGPU has a universal compatibility feature, allowing a single codebase to run across all Apple platforms. The core architecture involves a graphics pipeline flow from web content to WebKit processing to the Metal framework and finally to GPU hardware. WebGPU supports various resource types, including buffers, textures, samplers, and GPU bind groups, which are equivalent to Metal framework components. The platform also supports pipeline types, including render pipelines and compute pipelines, and WGSL shader programming with vertex, fragment, and compute shaders. WebGPU has key features like web-safe design, Apple involvement, and workgroup architecture, which enable parallel execution with global invocation IDs. The platform also provides performance optimization techniques, including memory efficiency, render bundle strategy, and resource minimization, to achieve near-native performance. Overall, WebGPU transforms web development by bringing Metal's performance and flexibility to browsers, enabling new application categories and reducing overhead for developers.