Comments on: Upgrade your graphics drivers!

By: Pes 2012 Patch

Pes 2012 Patch — Sun, 01 May 2011 00:21:00 +0000

Good information,I will upgrade my Nvidia graphic card

By: bjacob

bjacob — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 10:53:41 +0000

Lee: Chrome is now using a GPU blacklist very similar to Firefox’s, see:
http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/browser/resources/software_rendering_list.json

By: Lee

Lee — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 17:51:56 +0000

I am currently using both Firefox 4 RC and Google Chrome 10 on Windows Vista Enterprise SP1. Google Chrome 10 does not set GPU Accelerated Compositing and GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D by default, but Chrome allows me to turn them on, and it appears that after I turned GPU Accelerated Compositing and GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D on in Chrome 10, the page loads faster, that means it is working, and Chrome 10 did not ask me to upgrage my graphics drivers. I think that Firefox 4 RC set GPU Accelerated Compositing and GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D by default, but it appears that Firefox 4 RC’s hardware acceleration did not work on my computer.

By: bjacob

bjacob — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 19:35:02 +0000

@ Anonymous: these systems are broken, and that’s what we’re saying by turning off gfx features on them. The hard part is to do that while still keeping these features enabled for people with good drivers. This is hard because just trying to get driver information may be enough to crash, and we don’t want to crash — not even on systems with bad drivers.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 08:02:06 +0000

I have to ask, if people have such terrible graphics drivers that even attempting to initialize enough of OpenGL to call glGetString crashes, 1) how do they manage to function at all, and 2) why shouldn’t Firefox just consider those systems fundamentally broken to begin with and not worry about them?

I can understand not wanting to cause problems for people who have “good enough” 3D that doesn’t actually fully support the capabilities required for Firefox, particularly when if other major FOSS program has taken advantage of those capabilities before. (Though I still would prefer the approach of “please fix your graphics drivers”.) But when *glGetString* crashes…at what point do you just tell people “your system is broken”?

By: bjacob

bjacob — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:19:05 +0000

@ Anonymous: thanks. Yes, that is enough to whitelist this driver, especially as you’re not the only person to report success with this configuration. I am working at the moment on the code allowing us to whitelist drivers based on such criteria, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=639842 . That’s for Firefox 5. Once that is done, we’ll be able to add such whitelist entries.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 23:26:07 +0000

Apparently when I said “momentarily” I meant “a few days later”. Sorry about that. Just ran the WebGL conformance test suite. No crashes at all. Results: (5375 of 5503 passed, 1 timed out).

Test results at http://pastebin.com/dLBi5XBz ; I also put a copy of the HTML version at http://pastebin.com/PqVewucW since the text version didn’t show the specific tests that failed.

Between that and the previous information from glxinfo, does that provide enough information to un-blacklist?

By: pl4n3

pl4n3 — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 13:42:37 +0000

Yea, I have both forces enabled. Imo the little discrepancy is because of javascript execution speed, but stuff runs still very nice in both browsers.

By: bjacob

bjacob — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 12:51:34 +0000

pl4n3: in Firefox, when you force-enabled WebGL, have you also force-enabled accelerated layers? layers.acceleration.force-enabled=true. This makes an especially large difference because of bug 640170.

By: pl4n3

pl4n3 — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 11:45:02 +0000

If I may, a last word about chrome from me. I found out how to force webgl there: by commandline param –ignore-gpu-blacklist

Now on both major browsers WebGl works again here.

As for comparing webgl-fps: In my demo I have here 40 fps for Firefox and 50fps for Chrome. Both very smooth, probably javascript in chrome is still abit faster. On the other hand Html5 audio works alot better in Firefox.