Figma Rendering: Powered by WebGPU
October 20, 2025
When Figma Design launched in 2015, most rich design tools were still native desktop apps. Betting on WebGL—a browser graphics API originally designed for 3D applications—was a bold move. WebGL wasn’t widely used for complex 2D applications at the time, but Figma’s team saw its potential to power a smooth, infinite canvas in the browser. That early bet on WebGL set the foundation for Figma’s performance and real-time collaboration capabilities.
In 2023, Chromium shipped support for WebGPU, the successor to WebGL. It allows for new rendering optimizations not possible in WebGL—for instance, compute shaders that can be used to move work off the CPU and onto the GPU to take advantage of its parallel processing. By supporting WebGPU, we could also avoid WebGL’s bug-prone global state, and benefit from much more performant and clear error-handling.
Figma is a web-native product and company. Well over a decade ago, they made the bet that rather than being native apps, design tools should, like many other apps, live in the browser, live natively on the web.
The technology that enabled building such a sophisticated, graphically rich interactive application in the browser at the time was WebGL.
More recently, we’ve seen the release of WebGPU, a way in which web applications written in JavaScript can access the GPU of a device.
These days, we associate GPUs, of course, with AI. With the training of and inference on large language models.
But the G stands for graphics, and for decades GPUs have accelerated the graphical performance of computers.
WebGPU gives developers access to the GPU on their device directly and dramatically speeds up the performance of many kinds of calculation.
Here, the engineering team involved with the implementation of their new web GPU-powered workflows talk about the challenges and the techniques associated with it.
