Storage textures are just textures that you can directly write or “store” to. Normally we specify triangles in a vertex shader and the GPU updates the texture for us indirectly but with a storage texture we can write directly to the texture wherever we want.

Storage textures are not a special type of texture, rather, they are just a texture like any other texture that you create with createTexture. You add the STORAGE_BINDING usage flag and now you can use the texture as a storage texture on top of whatever other usage flags you need and then you can also use the texture as a storage texture.

In sense, a storage texture is like a storage buffer that we use as a 2d array. For example we could make a storage buffer and reference it in code like this

@group(0) @binding(0)
  var<storage> buf: array<f32>;

...
fn loadValueFromBuffer(pos: vec2u) -> f32 {
  return buffer[pos.y * width + pos.x];
}

fn storeValueToBuffer(pos: vec2u, v: f32) {
  buffer[pos.y * width + pos.x] = v;
}

...
  let pos = vec2u(2, 3);
  var v = loadValueFromBuffer(pos);
  storeValueToBuffer(pos, v * 2.0);

vs a storage texture

@group(0) @binding(0)
  var tex: texture_storage_2d<r32float, read_write>;

...

   let pos = vec2u(2, 3);
   let mipLevel = 0;
   var v = textureLoad(tex, pos, mipLevel);
   textureStore(tex, pos, mipLevel, v * 2);

So given that those seem equivalent, what are the differences between manually using a storage buffer and a storage texture?

• A storage texture is still a texture.

  You can use it with one shader as a storage texture and as regular texture (with samplers, and mip-mapping, etc) in another shader.

• A storage texture has format interpretation, a storage buffer does not.

  Example:

  @group(0) @binding(0) var tex: texture_storage_2d<rgba8unorm, read>;
  @group(0) @binding(1) var buf: array<f32>;
  
     ...
      let t = textureLoad(tex, pos, 0);
      let b = buffer[pos.y * bufferWidth + pos.x];
  

  Above, when we call textureLoad, the texture is an rgba8unorm texture which means 4 bytes are loaded and automatically converted to 4 floating point values between 0 and 1 and returned as a vec4f.

  In the buffer case, 4 bytes are loaded as a single f32 value. We could change buffer to array<u32> and then load a value, and manually split it into 4 byte values, and convert those to floats ourselves but, if that’s what we wanted we get it for free with a storage texture.

• A storage texture has dimensions

  For a buffer, the only dimension is its length, or rather, the length of its binding ^[1]. Above, when we used a buffer as a 2D array, we needed width to convert from a 2d coordinate to a 1d buffer index. We’d have to either hard code the value for width or pass it in some how^[2]. With a texture we can call textureDimensions to get the texture’s dimensions.

That said, there are limits on storage textures.

• Only certain formats can be read_write.

  Those are r32float, r32sint, and r32uint.

  Other supported formats can only be read or write within a single shader.

• Only certain formats can be used as storage textures.

  There are a large number of texture formats but only certain ones can be usage as storage textures.

  • rgba8(unorm/snorm/sint/uint)
  • rgba16(float/sint/uint)
  • rg32(float/sint/uint)
  • rgba32(float/sint/uint)

  One format to notice missing is bgra8unorm which we’ll cover below.

• Storage textures can not use samplers

  If we use a texture as normal TEXTURE_BINDING then we can call functions like textureSample which load up to 16 texels across mip levels and blend them together. When we use a texture as a STORAGE_BINDING we can only call textureLoad and/or textureStore which load and store a single texel at a time.

Canvas as a Storage Texture

You can use a canvas texture as a storage texture. To do so, you configure the context to give you a texture that can be used as a storage texture.

  const presentationFormat = navigator.gpu.getPreferredCanvasFormat()
  context.configure({
    device,
    format: presentationFormat,
+    usage: GPUTextureUsage.TEXTURE_BINDING |
+           GPUTextureUsage.STORAGE_BINDING,
  });

TEXTURE_BINDING is needed so the browser itself can render the texture to the page. STORAGE_BINDING lets us use the canvas’s textures as storage textures. If we still wanted to render to the texture via a render pass, like most examples on this site, we’d also add the RENDER_ATTACHMENT usage.

There’s a complication here though. As we covered in the first article, normally we call navigator.gpu.getPreferredCanvasFormat to get the preferred canvas format. getPreferredCanvasFormat will return either rgba8unorm or bgra8unorm depending on whichever format is more performant for the user’s system.

But, as mentioned above, by default, we can not use a bgra8unorm texture as a storage texture.

Fortunately there is a feature called 'bgra8unorm-storage'. Enabling that feature will allow a bgra8unorm texture as a storage texture. In general, it should be available on any platform that reports bgra8unorm as its preferred canvas format but, there is some possibility it’s not available. So, we need to check if the 'bgra8unorm-storage' feature exists. If it exists, we’ll require it for our device and we’ll use the preferred canvas format. If not, we’ll choose rgba8unorm as our canvas format.

  const adapter = await navigator.gpu?.requestAdapter();
-  const device = await adapter?.requestDevice();
+  const hasBGRA8unormStorage = adapter.features.has('bgra8unorm-storage');
+  const device = await adapter?.requestDevice({
+    requiredFeatures: hasBGRA8unormStorage
+      ? ['bgra8unorm-storage']
+      : [],
+  });
  if (!device) {
    fail('need a browser that supports WebGPU');
    return;
  }

  // Get a WebGPU context from the canvas and configure it
  const canvas = document.querySelector('canvas');
  const context = canvas.getContext('webgpu');
-  const presentationFormat = navigator.gpu.getPreferredCanvasFormat()
+  const presentationFormat = hasBGRA8unormStorage
+     ? navigator.gpu.getPreferredCanvasFormat()
+     : 'rgba8unorm';
  context.configure({
    device,
    format: presentationFormat,
    usage: GPUTextureUsage.TEXTURE_BINDING |
           GPUTextureUsage.STORAGE_BINDING,
  });

Now we can use the canvas texture as a storage texture. Let’s make a simple compute shader to draw concentric circles in the texture.

  const module = device.createShaderModule({
    label: 'circles in storage texture',
    code: `
      @group(0) @binding(0)
      var tex: texture_storage_2d<${presentationFormat}, write>;

      @compute @workgroup_size(1) fn cs(
        @builtin(global_invocation_id) id : vec3u
      )  {
        let size = textureDimensions(tex);
        let center = vec2f(size) / 2.0;

        // the pixel we're going to write to
        let pos = id.xy;

        // The distance from the center of the texture
        let dist = distance(vec2f(pos), center);

        // Compute stripes based on the distance
        let stripe = dist / 32.0 % 2.0;
        let red = vec4f(1, 0, 0, 1);
        let cyan = vec4f(0, 1, 1, 1);
        let color = select(red, cyan, stripe < 1.0);

        // Write the color to the texture
        textureStore(tex, pos, color);
      }
    `,
  });

Notice we marked the storage texture as write and that we had to specify the specific texture format in the shader itself. Unlike TEXTURE_BINDINGs, STORAGE_BINDINGs need to know the exact format of the texture.

Setting it up is similar to the compute shader we wrote in the first article. After making a shader module we setup a compute pipeline to use it.

  const pipeline = device.createComputePipeline({
    label: 'circles in storage texture',
    layout: 'auto',
    compute: {
      module,
    },
  });

To render we get the canvas’s current texture, make a bind group so we can pass the texture to the shader, and then do the normal things of setting a pipeline, binding bind groups, and dispatching workgroups.

  function render() {
    const texture = context.getCurrentTexture();

    const bindGroup = device.createBindGroup({
      layout: pipeline.getBindGroupLayout(0),
      entries: [
        { binding: 0, resource: texture.createView() },
      ],
    });

    const encoder = device.createCommandEncoder({ label: 'our encoder' });
    const pass = encoder.beginComputePass();
    pass.setPipeline(pipeline);
    pass.setBindGroup(0, bindGroup);
    pass.dispatchWorkgroups(texture.width, texture.height);
    pass.end();

    const commandBuffer = encoder.finish();
    device.queue.submit([commandBuffer]);
  }

And here it is

Using a regular texture would change nothing except we’d call createTexture instead of getCurrentTexture to make our texture and pass in STORAGE_BINDING along with whatever other usage flags we need.

Speed and data races.

Above, we dispatched 1 workgroup per pixel. This is wasteful, and the GPU can run much faster. Optimizing the shader for the optimal amount of work would have complicated the example. The point was to demonstrate using a storage texture, not the fastest possible shader. You can read up on some methods of optimizing compute shaders in the article on computing an image histogram.

Similarly, because you can write anywhere in the storage texture, you need to be aware of race conditions like we covered in the other articles on compute shaders. The order the invocations run is not guaranteed. It’s up to you to avoid races and/or insert textureBarriers or other things to make sure 2 or more invocations do not step on each other’s toes.

Examples

compute.toys is a website with lots of examples of writing directly to a storage texture. WARNING: While there are many things to learn from the examples on compute.toys they are not necessarily best practice. Compute toys is about making interesting things with only compute shaders. It’s a fun puzzle to figure out how to do something creative with only compute shaders but be aware, other methods might be 10s, 100s, or 1000s of times faster.