WebGPU compute is broken on firefox nightly, and chrome / dawn has too severe of buffer limits: cannot run axon on web yet

[rcoreilly]

Describe the bug

This is a tracking issue for issues running axon simulations under GPU on web browsers.

Firefox

Firefox nightly has webgpu support, and it is built on top of the rust wgpu that we successfully use in native mode: https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu

• https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/

Unfortunately, it has a severe performance bug in mapAsync that makes it unusuable:

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1900273

gpu/examples/compute has timing that demonstrates the bug.

Chrome

Chrome has production webgpu enabled, but it enforces an (unnecessary) limit of 10 buffers per stage, while axon requires 24.

• https://issues.chromium.org/issues/366151398?pli=1

Otherwise, on the compute example it is just as fast as wgpu native.

Safari

Production safari can enable webgpu in developer settings / feature flags, but it doesn't even work for basic graphics.

Technology preview does better, mostly working with the 2D Draw graphics, but the 3D netview is glitchy

• https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/

The gpu/examples/compute runs, is 2x slower overall but the mapAsync part is reasonably fast / comparable to native.

How to reproduce

run axon/examples/ra25 using core run web

Example code

No response

Relevant output

No response

Platform

macOS