David Walter
I'm the developer of Shiny Gen, a game maker app made with Godot, and the developer of Godot WebGPU. I previously graduated from MIT and worked at Autodesk, Lightmatter, and Amazon as a machine learning software engineer and 2 years ago went full-time on solo game development for Shiny Gen.
Session
Godot 4’s full RenderingDevice pipeline, including compute shaders and storage buffers,has historically been out of reach in the browser because WebGL cannot express the APIsit needs. This talk covers an experimental WebGPU backend for Godot implemented as aRenderingDeviceDriver, the same abstraction targeted by Godot’s Vulkan, Metal, and D3D12backends, allowing the existing Forward Mobile and Forward+ renderers to run in Chrome,Firefox, and Safari with minimal changes to the core renderer.
I’ll walk through the key engineering challenges behind the project: translating SPIR-Vshaders to WGSL, reducing the cost of thousands of WASM-to-JS-to-GPU calls per frame,and adapting Godot’s rendering assumptions to WebGPU’s stricter model without push constants,subpasses, or explicit barriers. The result is currently around 4x faster than Godot’sWebGL pipeline, about 70% as fast as native in tested scenarios, and can run the Forward+ global-illumination stack in the browser.
The project was also built with AI assistance. I’ll discuss how that changed the development process: where it helped accelerate exploration and implementation, where human judgment was still essential, and what the experience taught me about working inside Godot’s rendering architecture.
In 25 minutes, this will be a technical tour of what was built, why WebGPU matters for Godot developers, and what lessons from the project may apply to future engine work.