alt Hacker NewsShow HN: a Rust ray tracer that runs on any GPU – even in the browser
I’ve been experimenting with Rust lately and wanted a project that would help me explore some of its lower-level and performance-oriented features. Inspired by Sebastian Lague’s videos, I decided to implement my own ray tracer from scratch.
The initial goal was just to render a simple 3D scene in the browser at a reasonable frame rate. It evolved into a small renderer that can: • Run locally or on the web using wgpu and WebAssembly • Perform mesh rendering with a Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) for acceleration • Simulate both direct and indirect illumination for photorealistic results • Be deployed easily as a free web demo using GitHub Pages
The project is far from perfect, but it’s been a fun way to dig deeper into graphics programming and learn more about Rust’s ecosystem. I’m also planning to experiment with Rust for some ML projects next.
GitHub: https://github.com/tchauffi/rust-rasterizer Web demo (desktop browsers): https://tchauffi.github.io/rust-rasterizer/
Would love feedback from anyone who’s built similar projects or has experience with wgpu or ray tracing in Rust.
Comments
Why did you call the project rasterizer when it is not using rasterization but raytracing?
In Safari 26 on an M1 with WebGPU enabled I get "InvalidStateError: GPUCommandEncoder.beginComputePass: Unable to begin compute pass."
In Chrome I get "Failed to start: Failed to create State. Caused by: failed to find GPU adapter."
So I guess it runs on "some" GPUs, in "some" browsers!
Very cool. Enjoyed playing with the "bounces" slider - it's fascinating how little improvement each additional bounce contributes after about 3 bounces. Severely diminishing returns in terms of the final image quality.
It looks cool, nice project.
Recommend taking a few minutes to make the web page work on mobile.
For example on iPhone the actual webgpu/ray tracing seems to work fine but html formatting is shoving things over to be barely visible.
runs on any GPU – even in the browser
Seems pretty clickbaity and dishonest when that's just what webgl and webgpu means. Just say webgpu.
Also the roughness doesn't apply to the environment map.
https://www.jsweet.org/examples/#Ray_tracer
Written in Java then transpiled to JavaScript, been around for years.
In Firefox, open about:config and set this to true: `dom.webgpu.enabled`.