14 DAY TRIAL // Google has been working hard on bringing more hardware acceleration support to Chrome. As more stages of the rendering process and more elements are offset to the GPU for processing, Chrome should speed up and the CPU will be free to handle other tasks, all of this while the system consumes less power. It's a win-win situation.
Unfortunately, in practice, proper hardware acceleration support is harder to do than it should be, in part due to poor quality or out-of-date drivers.
As the Chrome team works to enable hardware acceleration by default for more components, it has had to 'blacklist' a broader number of older drivers to ensure stability which takes precedence over performance.
"Over the last few months, we’ve made a lot of progress using graphics hardware (commonly referred to as the GPU) to make Chrome faster and more power-efficient," Henry Bridge, Product Manager at Google, wrote.
"However, as we’ve rolled out features like WebGL and GPU-accelerated HTML5 video, we noticed a troubling trend: users with old graphics drivers experienced a significant increase in crashes when using these features," he explained.
"Because stability is one of Google Chrome’s core principles, we’ve recently become stricter about requiring up-to-date drivers and graphics hardware by adding ranges of old drivers to Google Chrome’s software rendering list," he announced.
In practice, this means that Chrome will opt not to use the graphics hardware on a bigger number of systems and instead use the tried and tested software renderer.
This will mean poorer performance for those affected, or rather it will mean they won't be able to benefit from the big performance improvements the hardware accelerated rendering provides. But it will mean that their browser won't crash or behave unpredictably, a worthwhile trade-off Google believes.
When it comes to pure 3D, WebGL content, it will mean that the content won't be displayed at all. But Google says it plans to add some support for basic WebGL content so everyone can benefit from the technology.
However, all of this can be easily avoided by simply using the latest drivers for your hardware. Of course, even this doesn't guarantee stability, hardware makers have a reputation of sometimes releasing poor quality drivers, but it's the best you can do.