Stress / 03

WebGPU compute.

Dispatches a parallel multiply-add shader and reports GOps/sec. A direct read on raw compute throughput, separate from rasterisation.

Notes

WebGPU ships in Chrome 113+, Edge 113+, Safari 18+. On browsers without WebGPU you'll see 'unsupported'.

How it works

We request a GPU adapter, compile a tiny WGSL compute shader that does 512 multiply-add iterations per input element across 1 million elements, dispatch it 30 times, and wait for device.queue.onSubmittedWorkDone(). Wall-clock time divided into total ops gives the GOps/s figure.

A warmup dispatch is run first to absorb shader-compile cost and let the GPU clocks ramp up. The reported number is steady-state throughput, not first-frame burst.

Related
WebGL benchmark
Triangle rasterisation ceiling — geometry pipeline.
CPU benchmark
Multi-thread hashing on every logical core.
Hash benchmark
SHA-256 MB/s — CPU hardware crypto acceleration.
Browser capabilities
Check which other modern APIs are supported.
Frequently asked

What is WebGPU?

WebGPU is the modern successor to WebGL. It exposes the GPU's compute pipeline (not just rasterisation), uses lower-level command buffers like Vulkan / Metal / D3D12, and is the API serious browser-based machine-learning and physics simulations will be built on. It ships in Chrome 113+, Edge 113+, and Safari 18+.

What does GOps/s mean?

Giga-operations per second — billions of fused multiply-adds (or equivalent ops) per second. Our shader does 512 multiply-add steps per input element across 1 million elements, then we dispatch 30 times. Total ops / total wall time gives the GOps/s figure. A modern dGPU lands in 100-500 GOps/s on this workload; integrated GPUs hit 5-30.

Why is WebGPU slower than native CUDA / Metal?

Browser sandbox overhead plus the WebGPU validation layer add a few percent at most for steady-state compute. The bigger gap is feature parity — WebGPU lacks some advanced compute primitives (subgroup ops, FP16 in widespread support) that native APIs ship. For straight matmul / convolution, performance is typically 80-95% of native.

Why does my browser say 'unsupported'?

Firefox doesn't ship WebGPU yet (behind dom.webgpu.enabled in about:config). Older Chrome / Edge (<113) lack it. On Linux, a small number of GPU + driver combinations remain blocked for safety. Update your browser, or try Chrome Canary.

How does this compare to the WebGL benchmark?

WebGL measures rasterisation throughput — triangles per frame. WebGPU compute measures raw arithmetic throughput. They correlate (a fast GPU is fast at both) but they measure different sub-pipelines. Run both: WebGL maxes out the geometry / fragment pipeline; WebGPU maxes out compute units.

Related tools in Stress
CPU benchmark
Multi-thread hash workload.
WebGL benchmark
Triangle throughput, shader complexity.
Hash benchmark
SHA-256 throughput in MB/s.
Memory pressure
Allocation ceiling probe.
Thermal reveal
Back-to-back CPU bench detects throttling.