WebGPU or WebGL: what we ship in 2026 and why

Where the browsers are

WebGPU now ships in Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox on desktop and on most current phones. WebGL 2 is everywhere, including the four-year-old Android phone a customer in a showroom is holding. Both are real targets.

What WebGPU buys

Compute shaders: particle systems, physics and image processing on the GPU without the tricks WebGL needs. Lower overhead per draw, so more objects at the same frame rate. Shaders in WGSL, a language built for it.

What WebGL keeps

Reach. If the product page must work for every visitor, WebGL is the floor. The home page of this site runs 140,000 particles on WebGL for exactly that reason, and it holds sixty frames a second on a mid-range phone.

How we decide

We set a frame-rate budget per device class on the first call. If the scene holds the budget on WebGL, we ship WebGL and everyone sees it. If it needs compute, we ship WebGPU with a WebGL path that reduces quality, not features. If motion is off or the GPU is missing, a still image. No visitor sees a blank box.

Try it

The WebGPU check in the Lab tells you what your own browser and GPU can do, in a second.