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GPU compute in the browser at the speed of native: WebGPU marching cubes

April 22, 2024 WebGPU is a powerful GPU-API for the web, providing support for advanced low-overhead rendering pipelines and GPU compute pipelines. WebGPU’s support for GPU compute shaders and storage buffers are a key distinction from WebGL, which lacks these features, and make it possible to bring powerful GPU-parallel applications to run entirely in the browser.

WebGPU’s support for GPU compute shaders and storage buffers are a key distinction from WebGL, which lacks these features, and make it possible to bring powerful GPU-parallel applications to run entirely in the browser. The initial motivation for Marching Cubes was medical visualization, where given a 3D volume from a CT or MRI scan, the algorithm was used to compute surfaces representing bone or tissue for display. To write a compact vertex buffer while preventing voxels from trampling each other’s output, we will split up the triangulation process into two kernels, and leverage the classic parallel primitive “Prefix Sum”(also known as Exclusive Scan).

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