Show HN: Streaming multi-GB CT scans in the browser with WebGPU

2 pointsposted 6 hours ago
by m_panknin

1 Comments

m_panknin

6 hours ago

Why?

WebGPU volume rendering examples do exist, but they all assume fully GPU-resident datasets — the entire volume is uploaded to VRAM upfront, which caps practical dataset sizes at a few hundred megabytes at best.

Kiln overcomes this limitation: it treats GPU memory as a fixed-size cache and streams only the bricks the current view actually needs, making gigabyte-scale datasets viable in the browser.

Virtual texturing and out-of-core streaming are well-established in native graphics, but there is almost no prior WebGPU-native implementation of these techniques applied to volumetric data.

WDYT?