Tessellation Shaders

[kvark]

Tessellation is unlikely to come to WebGPU the API any time soon, but we could have a cargo feature enabling it in some shape (obviously, not portable to the Web). I think it would be useful to some of interested parties to tessellate with the ease of our API ;) Perhaps, in the longer term, our experiments would help the working group to define a proper extension API.

[lachlansneff]

Tessellation support would be really useful for me.

[pythonesque]

Is there any way we could test whether tessellation would be useful for a project written using wgpu-rs, without actually adding the feature to the project? It seems like something that might be useful for Veloren, but it's hard to know for sure without trying it; if it was useful for us I'd be interested in helping adding a cargo feature for it.

[kvark]

@pythonesque since Veloren is currently on gfx pre-ll, you can try the tessellation there and see if it's useful.

[profande]

Since this issue was made 3 years ago, I feel the need to ask: Would this still be a Cargo feature or would it be introduced as a native extension?

[cwfitzgerald]

Native extension

[whizsid]

Can't we do the tessellation using the compute shaders in webGPU like mentioned in this paper:- https://onrendering.com/data/papers/isubd/isubd.pdf

[kohakukun]

Hey folks, is there any development in this issue? It would be very useful for our project too.

[grovesNL]

@kohakukun Not yet, but there has been some effort into exposing more backend-specific APIs (e.g., using Vulkan resources directly), so in the meantime that might be a good path to experimenting with tessellation shaders to see if they would be helpful for your project.

[kohakukun]

Can you provide some example on how those lower APIs are accessed?

[grovesNL]

Generally you use functions like as_hal that are available natively. #4067 discusses how this API might evolve eventually and some details about how you can use those functions today.