# WebGPU & TSL: Compute Shaders 101

**Track:** Advanced Shaders & GPU — Advanced Creative Coding — proposed (50)
**Framework / surface:** three.js
**Level:** Insane
**Prerequisites:** GPGPU Particles, Instancing Many Objects

**In one line:** Storage-buffer compute; one node material → WGSL and GLSL.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

WebGPU brings the modern compute pipeline to the browser: storage buffers hold arbitrary structured data, and compute shaders dispatch work across the GPU's threads without the fiction of drawing pixels, replacing the older texture-packing workarounds with direct random-access memory. Three.js layers the Three.js Shading Language atop this—a node-based abstraction, advanced under Ricardo Cabello's stewardship, where a single material graph compiles transparently to WGSL for WebGPU and GLSL for the WebGL fallback. The shift is architectural rather than aesthetic: simulations, sorting, and particle systems express themselves as readable node trees instead of string-concatenated shaders, and one description targets two backends without rewrite.