Paul - The Programmer

The latest Google Chrome browser comes with the GPU accelereation feature.

You may already know that to enable the GPU acceleration, we only need to enable the flag 'GPU Accelerated Compositing' and flag 'GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D' in the tab about:flags.

But it is not that kind of easy. On Linux, the GPU acceleration needs the OpenGL 2.0 support.

By checking with glxinfo.

$ glxinfo | grep -i opengl
OpenGL vendor string: DRI R300 Project
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R300 (RV380 5460) 20090101 x86/MMX/SSE2 TCL
OpenGL version string: 1.5 Mesa 7.7.1
OpenGL extensions:

My video card only support OpenGL 1.5 so far. This means even though the flag is enabled in the Chrome, still no hardware accelerated for page rendering at all.

The ATI Catalyst driver can give you up to OpenGL 4.0 and better 3D performance. But for my old X300, I can only choose the open source drive xf86-video-ati with OpenGL support by Mesa 3D Graphic Library.

The Mesa 3D Graphic Library can support OpenGL 2.0 by software-only rendering driver. I doubt update Mesa library can bring any help. 

So, I just give up the Chrome GPU acceleration. 

By the way, the flag 'Web Page Prerendering' is really helpful to imporve the page loading performance.

The Chrome 8 comes with GPU acceleration. But this feature is disabled by default.

To enable this feature, just startup Chrome with parameter :

--enable-gpu-plugin --enable-gpu-rendering --enable-accelerated-2d-canvas --enable-accelerated-compositing

Then you should find the gpu plugin enabled in tab config:plugins.

I tried this on my old laptop ( Debian Lenny + Chrome testing brunch version 8 ). Didn't get to it works well. The web page be rendered in a mess.

Then try to start Chrome without the --enable-gpu-rendering, everything seems recovered. But didn't find anything noticeable accelerated comparing with the one without hardware accelerated.

The GPU rendering is still an incomplete functionality.

The testing web page is from Microsoft, http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/FishIETank/

My score is around 20 fishes with 15 FPS and the CPU is fully loaded.

What's a pity.