Sourced from wgpu's changelog.

v28.0.0 (2025-12-17)

Major Changes

Mesh Shaders

This has been a long time coming. See the tracking issue for more information. They are now fully supported on Vulkan, and supported on Metal and DX12 with passthrough shaders. WGSL parsing and rewriting is supported, meaning they can be used through WESL or naga_oil.

Mesh shader pipelines replace the standard vertex shader pipelines and allow new ways to render meshes. They are ideal for meshlet rendering, a form of rendering where small groups of triangles are handled together, for both culling and rendering.

They are compute-like shaders, and generate primitives which are passed directly to the rasterizer, rather than having a list of vertices generated individually and then using a static index buffer. This means that certain computations on nearby groups of triangles can be done together, the relationship between vertices and primitives is more programmable, and you can even pass non-interpolated per-primitive data to the fragment shader, independent of vertices.

Mesh shaders are very versatile, and are powerful enough to replace vertex shaders, tesselation shaders, and geometry shaders on their own or with task shaders.

A full example of mesh shaders in use can be seen in the mesh_shader example. For the full specification of mesh shaders in wgpu, go to https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/blob/trunk/docs/api-specs/mesh_shading.md. Below is a small snippet of shader code demonstrating their usage:

@task
@payload(taskPayload)
@workgroup_size(1)
fn ts_main() -> @builtin(mesh_task_size) vec3<u32> {
    // Task shaders can use workgroup variables like compute shaders
    workgroupData = 1.0;
    // Pass some data to all mesh shaders dispatched by this workgroup
    taskPayload.colorMask = vec4(1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0);
    taskPayload.visible = 1;
    // Dispatch a mesh shader grid with one workgroup
    return vec3(1, 1, 1);
}
@​mesh(mesh_output)
@​payload(taskPayload)
@​workgroup_size(1)
fn ms_main(@​builtin(local_invocation_index) index: u32, @​builtin(global_invocation_id) id: vec3<u32>) {
// Set how many outputs this workgroup will generate
mesh_output.vertex_count = 3;
mesh_output.primitive_count = 1;
// Can also use workgroup variables
workgroupData = 2.0;
// Set vertex outputs
mesh_output.vertices[0].position = positions[0];

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• 3f02781 update metal to 0.33
• e72a77c update release checklist
• 68c74ff Update versions
• 999dd28 Update changelog
• fa8afdf Fix mesh task workgroup limit on nvidia (#8754)
• c5e460f Fix regressions in logical operator handling in const exprs (#8721)
• b74007f Fix mesh shader validation (#8749)
• 49be67a Naga mesh shader WGSL writer (#8481)
• daf69de Bump MSRV to 1.92 for real (#8723)
• 952d653 New mesh shader limits (#8507)
• Additional commits viewable in compare view

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