---
name: renderer
description: Architecture rules for GPU rendering with TypeGPU/WebGPU. Use when adding or changing render passes, shaders, frame orchestration, GPU resources, culling, terrain, shadows, or visual performance work.
---

# GPU renderer

The renderer is TypeGPU over WebGPU. It draws plain frame inputs the
application hands it and never reaches into simulation or app state. These are
the flaws that sink a 3D experience; check a change against each before
writing it.

- **Fixed-view cost never grows with world size.** For a fixed camera and
  render size, submitted geometry, shadow casters, and per-frame lists are
  bounded by what the view can see or cast into, and screen-space work by
  pixels. Store the world map-wide; select from it spatially. Frustum clipping
  does not make vertices free.
- **One owner per contract.** Frame orchestration, camera, depth convention,
  targets, culling, lighting, timing, and resource lifetime each have one
  owner every pass shares. Extend it; a second copy drifts.
- **Shared contracts change together.** Depth and lighting are engine-wide:
  every pass reads the same convention and every material the same shading
  path. A per-pass exception is a future visual bug.
- **No GPU resource without a lifetime owner.** Everything is allocated
  through the registry, rebuilds swap in whole, and repeated
  resize/rebuild/reset returns to baseline.
- **Pixels prove correctness, not counters.** An optimization is accepted
  only with an interleaved A/B on the real GPU and an image that shows the
  subject still drawn correctly.