WebGPU vs WebASM: Browser Inference Benchmarks

A detailed performance comparison of WebGPU versus WebAssembly (WASM) backends for running transformer models in the browser using Transformers.js v3. Benchmarks across text embedding, text generation, and image classification tasks reveal that WASM outperforms WebGPU for small models (<100M params) due to GPU buffer transfer overhead, while WebGPU delivers 10–15x throughput gains for large autoregressive models like TinyLlama on discrete GPUs. The article covers benchmark methodology, hardware tiers, quantization effects, memory consumption, and provides a hybrid backend selection strategy with production-ready code for fallback handling, OPFS model caching, and WASM multi-threading setup.