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You can also build Unreal Engine 5 applications for WebGPU as well! See demos linked below: https://simplystream.com/demos https://simplystream.com/demos Edit

You can also build Unreal Engine 5 applications for WebGPU as well! See demos linked below: https://simplystream.com/demos https://simplystream.com/demos Edit: These demo should load faster, but use WebGL: https://topdown.tiwsamples.com/ https://topdown.tiwsamples.com/ https://vehiclegame.tiwsamples.com/ https://vehiclegame.tiwsamples.com/

flohofwoe 2y ago
More like you can wait for loading Unreal Engine 5 applications for WebGPU today ;) The car configurator demo loads a 117 MBytes WASM blob and then hundreds of tiny files between a few hundred bytes to a few KBytes, both extremes are worst case for a web application, it's quite hilarious really. The demo didn't finish loading while writing this comment, and it doesn't look like the loading of those tiny files will ever end...
- astlouis44 2y ago
  Yeah but the fact is that it works today, and will only get better and faster with time.
  - flohofwoe 2y ago
    I bet there's a lot of cheap wins by bundling all those tiny files in a few bigger ones. But minimizing the WASM blob for a humongous native engine like Unreal Engine 5 sounds like a real challenge. Even when this is reduced by 90% it's still 10x bigger than Unity's web output, which is 10x bigger than a specialized WASM game engine designed for the web as "first class citizen". I have higher hopes for the web people (like PlayCanvas, Babylon, threejs, etc...) writing a proper WASM game engine by "scaling up" their experience of building browser rendering engines, than the traditional "native game engine" people "scaling down" to web requirements (especially when it comes to time needed to start into the game - the entire asset loading system of native engines needs to be rebuilt from scratch for this).
    - astlouis44 2y ago
      We've actually managed to reduce the WASM runtime for UE5 to just 8MB compressed. In regards to downloading assets, we've built out an asset streaming system to address this. It allows you to dynamically load in just what you need, when you need it, while everything else that isn't needed right away can be fetched at runtime.
    - ge96 2y ago
      Introducing the cdn of pre built wasm blobs...
  - jsheard 2y ago
    I remember the experience of Unreal Engine demos compiled to asmjs a decade ago being more or less the same, taking absolutely forever to load before anything happens. It doesn't feel like much progress has been made on that front.
    - astlouis44 2y ago
      Try these demos instead (Unreal Engine using WebGL 2.0) https://vehiclegame.tiwsamples.com/ https://vehiclegame.tiwsamples.com/ https://topdown.tiwsamples.com/ https://topdown.tiwsamples.com/
      - jsheard 2y ago
        Those aren't as bad, about 20 seconds to get going from a cold cache. Car Configurator is incredibly slow though, I timed it at about 8 minutes to load from scratch and when it finally got there it was unusably laggy until I refreshed and let it start again with a pre-warmed cache. According to Chromes internal task manager the CarConfig tab is continuously using about 500% CPU (i.e. five entire cores) and 5GB of RAM despite very little going on in the demo. This is on a current-gen desktop processor.
      - verticalscaler 2y ago
        That's pretty neat, not much in the way of progress bar for me but they load in about 30 seconds. And it seems a little choppy at times but playable. Reminds me of late stage flash era games.
  - troupo 2y ago
    > Yeah but the fact is that it works today, and will only get better and faster with time. And your assumption is based on what exactly? WASM + WebGPU don't magically make the whole game, its assets and the engine it uses appear on your computer.
- MWil 2y ago
  The demo didn't finish loading on a 4090 after 5 minutes...
  - astlouis44 2y ago
    Which demo did you try? The car configurator? Also if you're using Firefox, WebGPU isn't supported there yet, so I recommend trying using a Chromium browser.
    - Eduard 2y ago
      DevTools will most likely help with debugging. In my case, several of the WebGPU demos on https://simplystream.com/demos https://simplystream.com/demos fail (while keeping on falsely showing "Loading") with the error message (in DevTools): "WebGPU requestDevice failed, trying low spec DOMException: Failed to execute 'requestDevice' on 'GPUAdapter': Required limit (64) is greater than the supported limit (32)."
    - MWil 2y ago
      Was using latest Chrome
- Firstrunner 2y ago
  Didn't work
- torginus 2y ago
  Honestly Unreal is incredibly suspect in these kinds of applications. Unreal's biggest hallmark is the incredible amount of shaders it generates (thousands for a simple scene) which leads to constant shader compilation delays and stutters even on desktop. I can't imagine it being good in a web scenario where you can't even precompile.
jeroenhd 2y ago
I like the portability aspect, but between the microstutters, broken textures, and visual glitches, I'm not particularly impressed by these. I kind of feel like Java did this in the browser ten years ago, albeit at a lower resolution. I guess it still needs work. It's not even available yet on Firefox, but I expected Chrome to work at the very least. Edit: oh, GPU support doesn't work on Linux, that explains the weirdness. Guess I'll wait for either Firefox or Chrome to release their final releases before I start experimenting with this!
p0w3n3d 2y ago
Demos - Cesium crashes my phone. Edit. Car config the same
webprofusion 2y ago
Unreal is a bloated way to develop WebGPU projects for the web. PlayCanvas is a sensible solution if your target is web.

flohofwoe 2y ago

More like you can wait for loading Unreal Engine 5 applications for WebGPU today ;) The car configurator demo loads a 117 MBytes WASM blob and then hundreds of tiny files between a few hundred bytes to a few KBytes, both extremes are worst case for a web application, it's quite hilarious really. The demo didn't finish loading while writing this comment, and it doesn't look like the loading of those tiny files will ever end...

astlouis44 2y ago
Yeah but the fact is that it works today, and will only get better and faster with time.
- flohofwoe 2y ago
  I bet there's a lot of cheap wins by bundling all those tiny files in a few bigger ones. But minimizing the WASM blob for a humongous native engine like Unreal Engine 5 sounds like a real challenge. Even when this is reduced by 90% it's still 10x bigger than Unity's web output, which is 10x bigger than a specialized WASM game engine designed for the web as "first class citizen". I have higher hopes for the web people (like PlayCanvas, Babylon, threejs, etc...) writing a proper WASM game engine by "scaling up" their experience of building browser rendering engines, than the traditional "native game engine" people "scaling down" to web requirements (especially when it comes to time needed to start into the game - the entire asset loading system of native engines needs to be rebuilt from scratch for this).
  - astlouis44 2y ago
    We've actually managed to reduce the WASM runtime for UE5 to just 8MB compressed. In regards to downloading assets, we've built out an asset streaming system to address this. It allows you to dynamically load in just what you need, when you need it, while everything else that isn't needed right away can be fetched at runtime.
  - ge96 2y ago
    Introducing the cdn of pre built wasm blobs...
- jsheard 2y ago
  I remember the experience of Unreal Engine demos compiled to asmjs a decade ago being more or less the same, taking absolutely forever to load before anything happens. It doesn't feel like much progress has been made on that front.
  - astlouis44 2y ago
    Try these demos instead (Unreal Engine using WebGL 2.0) https://vehiclegame.tiwsamples.com/ https://vehiclegame.tiwsamples.com/ https://topdown.tiwsamples.com/ https://topdown.tiwsamples.com/
    - jsheard 2y ago
      Those aren't as bad, about 20 seconds to get going from a cold cache. Car Configurator is incredibly slow though, I timed it at about 8 minutes to load from scratch and when it finally got there it was unusably laggy until I refreshed and let it start again with a pre-warmed cache. According to Chromes internal task manager the CarConfig tab is continuously using about 500% CPU (i.e. five entire cores) and 5GB of RAM despite very little going on in the demo. This is on a current-gen desktop processor.
    - verticalscaler 2y ago
      That's pretty neat, not much in the way of progress bar for me but they load in about 30 seconds. And it seems a little choppy at times but playable. Reminds me of late stage flash era games.
- troupo 2y ago
  > Yeah but the fact is that it works today, and will only get better and faster with time. And your assumption is based on what exactly? WASM + WebGPU don't magically make the whole game, its assets and the engine it uses appear on your computer.
MWil 2y ago
The demo didn't finish loading on a 4090 after 5 minutes...
- astlouis44 2y ago
  Which demo did you try? The car configurator? Also if you're using Firefox, WebGPU isn't supported there yet, so I recommend trying using a Chromium browser.
  - Eduard 2y ago
    DevTools will most likely help with debugging. In my case, several of the WebGPU demos on https://simplystream.com/demos https://simplystream.com/demos fail (while keeping on falsely showing "Loading") with the error message (in DevTools): "WebGPU requestDevice failed, trying low spec DOMException: Failed to execute 'requestDevice' on 'GPUAdapter': Required limit (64) is greater than the supported limit (32)."
  - MWil 2y ago
    Was using latest Chrome
Firstrunner 2y ago
Didn't work
torginus 2y ago
Honestly Unreal is incredibly suspect in these kinds of applications. Unreal's biggest hallmark is the incredible amount of shaders it generates (thousands for a simple scene) which leads to constant shader compilation delays and stutters even on desktop. I can't imagine it being good in a web scenario where you can't even precompile.

jeroenhd 2y ago

I like the portability aspect, but between the microstutters, broken textures, and visual glitches, I'm not particularly impressed by these. I kind of feel like Java did this in the browser ten years ago, albeit at a lower resolution. I guess it still needs work. It's not even available yet on Firefox, but I expected Chrome to work at the very least. Edit: oh, GPU support doesn't work on Linux, that explains the weirdness. Guess I'll wait for either Firefox or Chrome to release their final releases before I start experimenting with this!

p0w3n3d 2y ago

Demos - Cesium crashes my phone. Edit. Car config the same

webprofusion 2y ago

Unreal is a bloated way to develop WebGPU projects for the web. PlayCanvas is a sensible solution if your target is web.