Blade Graphics

Blade-graphics is a lean and mean GPU abstraction aimed at ergonomics and fun. See motivation, FAQ, and performance for details.

Examples

ray-query example particles example

Platforms

The backend is selected automatically based on the host platform:

Vulkan on desktop Linux, Windows, and Android
Metal on desktop macOS, and iOS
OpenGL ES3 on the Web

Feature	Vulkan	Metal	GLES
compute	:white_check_mark:	:white_check_mark:
ray tracing	:white_check_mark:

Vulkan

Required instance extensions:

VK_EXT_debug_utils
VK_KHR_get_physical_device_properties2
VK_KHR_get_surface_capabilities2

Required device extensions:

VK_KHR_descriptor_update_template
VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore
VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering

Conceptually, Blade requires the baseline Vulkan hardware with a relatively fresh driver. All of these required extensions are supported in software by the driver on any underlying architecture.

OpenGL ES

GLES is also supported at a basic level. It's enabled for wasm32-unknown-unknown target, and can also be force-enabled on native:

RUSTFLAGS="--cfg gles" CARGO_TARGET_DIR=./target-gl cargo run --example bunnymark

This path can be activated on all platforms via Angle library. For example, on macOS it's sufficient to place libEGL.dylib and libGLESv2.dylib in the working directory.

On Windows, the quotes aren't expected:

set RUSTFLAGS=--cfg gles

On native Linux with a DRM-capable GPU, the GLES backend uses a dual-context architecture for windowed presentation:

A main context is created on a GBM (Generic Buffer Manager) display backed by the DRM render node (/dev/dri/renderD128). All GPU work (rendering, compute) happens here.
A presentation context is created on the native Wayland/X11 display with a window surface for displaying frames.
A GBM buffer object is allocated and exported as a DMA-BUF, then imported as an EGLImage on both contexts. The main context renders into this shared texture, and the presentation context blits from it to the window surface.

This avoids the need for EGL_KHR_surfaceless_context to support window output, while keeping all rendering on a hardware-backed display. On CI or headless environments, the backend falls back to a surfaceless EGL display.

WebGL2

Following command will start a web server offering the bunnymark example:

cargo run-wasm --example bunnymark

Vulkan Portability

First, ensure to load the environment from the Vulkan SDK:

cd /opt/VulkanSDK && source setup-env.sh

Vulkan backend can be forced on using "vulkan" config flag. Example invocation that produces a vulkan (portability) build into another target folder:

RUSTFLAGS="--cfg vulkan" CARGO_TARGET_DIR=./target-vk cargo test