What's New in WebGPU (Chrome 143)

François Beaufort

Published: November 19, 2025

Texture component swizzle

It's now possible to rearrange or replace the color components from texture's red, green, blue, and alpha channels when accessed by a shader.

When the "texture-component-swizzle" feature is available in a GPUAdapter, request a GPUDevice with this feature, and create a GPUTextureView by calling createView() with a new swizzle option. This value is a string of length four, with each character mapping to the view's red, green, blue, and alpha components, respectively. Each character can be either:

"r": Take its value from the red channel of the texture.
"g": Take its value from the green channel of the texture.
"b": Take its value from the blue channel of the texture.
"a": Take its value from the alpha channel of the texture.
"0": Force its value to 0.
"1": Force its value to 1.

See the following snippet and chromestatus entry.

const adapter = await navigator.gpu.requestAdapter();
if (!adapter.features.has("texture-component-swizzle")) {
  throw new Error("Texture component swizzle support is not available");
}
// Explicitly request texture component swizzle support.
const device = await adapter.requestDevice({
  requiredFeatures: ["texture-component-swizzle"],
});

// ... Assuming myTexture is a GPUTexture with a single red channel.

// Map the view's red, green, blue components to myTexture's red channel
// and force the view's alpha component to 1 so that the shader sees it as
// a grayscale image.
const view = myTexture.createView({ swizzle: "rrr1" });

// Send the appropriate commands to the GPU...

Remove bgra8unorm read-only storage texture usage

As previously announced, using "bgra8unorm" format with read-only storage textures is now removed. The WebGPU specification explicitly disallows this, and its prior allowance in Chrome was a bug, as this format is intended for write-only access and is not portable. See issue 427681156.

Dawn updates

A validation error raised when clearing a 3D texture in Vulkan has been fixed. See issue 443950688

This covers only some of the key highlights. Check out the exhaustive list of commits.