Chrome will use the GPU for most operations, whenever possible

Oct 16, 2013 09:35 GMT  ·  By
During testing, an 'a' was added next to the menu button to indicate that Aura was active
   During testing, an 'a' was added next to the menu button to indicate that Aura was active

Google is in the midst of a major transition to an entirely new graphical stack for Chrome, dubbed Aura. Aura itself isn't that new, it's actually a few years old, but it has only been used by Chrome OS so far.

Aura handles everything you see on the screen in Chrome and Chrome OS: rendering, compositing, and so on. It also uses the GPU for all operations whenever possible.

Google has been testing Aura in the Chromium, Canary, and dev releases for a few months now. If you noticed an 'a' next to the Chrome menu button it means you were running Aura.

The company believes Aura is close to being ready for a wider release and the plan is to ship it on Windows with Chrome 32, now in the dev channel. Linux will follow in Chrome 33, but there are no plans for Mac support.

"The main issue is performance but we are making fast progress towards parity on that front. As in any release we are metrics driven; if we don't meet the speed, stability, security metrics we simply don't ship," Google explained in the Chromium-dev message board. "Aura is a grand unification of our graphics and UI stack that has significant implications."

With support for Aura shaping up, Google is also ready to provide details on the exact implementation. On Windows 7 and 8, Chrome will use Aura which will run entirely on the GPU, provided you have relatively new graphics drivers.

If there is a problem with the GPU rendering, Chrome will switch over to the software renderer, i.e. use the CPU automatically and instantly, unless the browser freezes due to the error or the system crashes altogether.

Windows XP users on the other hand will get only the software implementation, meaning the CPU is used exclusively. What's more, it's likely that there will be a performance regression along with the switch to Aura; Chrome will use more memory and CPU, though this should improve with future releases.

Users will be allowed to disable or the GPU rendering in the Chrome settings, at least for now, both on Windows XP and newer versions.

One side effect of switching to Aura is that anything that uses the GPU in the browser will be tied to the new graphical stack. That is, WebGL and Flash hardware acceleration will work only if Aura is using the GPU; otherwise, those are switched over to the CPU as well. If you need Flash hardware acceleration, you can switch over to the NPAPI plugin for now.