webgpu_inspector VS Viewers

Author of the WebGL volume rendering tutorial [0] you mentioned in the readme here, great work!

Working in WebGL/JS is nice since you can deploy it everywhere, but it can be really hard for graphics programming as you've found because there are very few tools for doing real GPU/graphics debugging for WebGL. The only one I know of is [1], and I've had limited success with it.

WebGPU is a great next step, it provides a modern GPU API (so if you want to learn Metal, DX12, Vulkan, they're more familiar), and modern GPU functionality like storage buffers and compute shaders, not to mention lower overhead and better performance. The WebGPU inspector [2] also looks to provide a GPU profiler/debugger for web that aims to be on par with native options. I just tried it out on a small project I have and it looks really useful. Another benefit of WebGPU is that it maps more clearly to Metal/DX12/Vulkan, so you can use native tools to profile it through Chrome [3].

I think it would be worth learning C++ and a native graphics API, you'll get access to the much more powerful graphics debugging & profiling features provided by native tools (PIX, RenderDoc, Nvidia Nsight, Xcode, etc.) and functionality beyond what even WebGPU exposes.

Personally, I have come "full circle": I started with C++ and OpenGL, then DX12/Vulkan/Metal, then started doing more WebGL/WebGPU and JS/TS to "run everywhere", and now I'm back writing C++ but using WebGL/WebGPU and compiling to WebAssembly to still everywhere (and native for tools).

With WebGPU, you could program in C++ (or Rust) and compile to both native (for access to debuggers and tools), and Wasm (for wide deployment on the web). This is one of the aspects of WebGPU that is most exciting to me. There's a great tutorial on developing WebGPU w/ C++ [4], and a one on using it from JS/TS [5].

[0] https://www.willusher.io/webgl/2019/01/13/volume-rendering-w...

[1] https://spector.babylonjs.com/

[2] https://github.com/brendan-duncan/webgpu_inspector

[3] https://toji.dev/webgpu-profiling/pix

[4] https://eliemichel.github.io/LearnWebGPU/

[5] https://webgpufundamentals.org/

My app does not support DICOM files as input. Just Uint8 256x256x256 raw files that are scaled 1x1x1. Maybe if I had the chance to work on it full-time I'd have the time to add those features, but it's just a side project for now.

Have you looked into Slicer3D[0] which is a multi-platform desktop app or Open Health Image Foundations dicom viewer[1] which is web-based? Perhaps one of these will help.

[0] https://www.slicer.org/

[1] https://github.com/OHIF/Viewers

On a side note, I noticed that a significant portion of this viewer is based on work done by folks at OHIF. Because of the incredible amount of work that went into creating those tools, it is worth citing them in the VinDR arxiv paper: