Enumerate adapters?

[toloudis]

Is there ever any intention of allowing more specific adapter selection by users? For multi GPU systems and offscreen rendering it makes sense to have a very specific choice of adapter. I saw an enumerate_adapters function but it looks very internal and not something usable from client code to actually select adapter from the results of enumerate_adapters.

[cwfitzgerald]

enumerate_adapters is exactly the function you should be using. You get a iterator of adapters which you can then use to get information Adapter::features Adapter::limits Adapter::get_info etc. From there you can decide on an adapter and call request_device on it.

We use it as part of our user space utilities: https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/blob/master/wgpu/src/util/init.rs#L40-L59 selects an adapter based on its name.

[toloudis]

Perfect, thank you so much for that confirmation.

[almarklein]

That function is part of wgpu-rs. Are there plans to expose something similar in WebGPU and/or wgpu-native?

[cwfitzgerald]

wgpu-native it totally could be, WebGPU only ever has one adapter, so it wouldn't be available.

[kvark]

gpuweb/gpuweb#2160 (comment) super fresh

[toloudis]

I completely understand the reasoning for WebGPU. I was mainly thinking about working with native implementations. I am interested in using the wgpu api for a cross platform graphics API and in particular the wgpu-py library. And for the scientific volume rendering application I am developing my users have an interest in being able to select a GPU based on memory available, and they may have access to systems with multiple GPUs.

[cwfitzgerald]

Yeah, on native (or even on node/deno) there's no reason why this couldn't be exposed.