The WebGL JavaScript API males hardware-accelerated 3D graphics (like 3D configurators) available on the Web. Chrome 56 provides support for WebGL 2.0, an important API upgrade that unlocks a host of new graphics features and advanced rendering techniques. WebGL 2.0 is currently available for Chrome users with advanced graphics hardware on Windows, MacOS and Linux, and will soon be available for Android.
WebGL 1.0 has been supported by Chrome for exactly 6 years now and has since given web developers the ability to create impressive graphical experiences without plug-ins, from mixing World Cup games in real time to visualizing a climbing route in a newspaper article. WebGL 2.0 now makes it even easier to create 3D web applications with faster real-time rendering, new textures, shaders, and reduced video memory usage. Techniques such as deferred shading, tone mapping, volumetric effects and particle effects can now be efficiently implemented. The new APIs also bring WebGL up to par with the graphics platform commonly used in mobile games.
In addition to the new rendering capabilities, WebGL 2.0 offers a significantly enhanced conformance test suite with over 340.000 test cases to ensure that different web browsers offer compatible graphics platforms. Chrome delivers 100% of these test cases to multiple GPU vendors on each desktop platform, ensuring that the WebGL 2.0 implementation is stable and consistent.
To get started with WebGL 2.0, we recommend you take a look at the WebGL 2.0 Sample Pack, which contains small, self-contained examples of most new API features. You can also see WebGL 2.0 in action in After the Flood1, an interactive demo of PlayCanvas created in collaboration with Mozilla. Finally, you`ll find more news about future graphics features, such as OpenGL ES 3.1 support and explorations into a subordinate web graphics API that supports the new explicit graphics interface such as Vulcan, Metal and DirectX12.
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