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Nvidia hobbles WebGL performance on laptops

17 points| AshleysBrain | 12 years ago |scirra.com | reply

8 comments

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[+] jdboyd|12 years ago|reply
Since Chrome uses the 3D accelerator to render normal pages, without Nvidia's "hobble" the 2nd GPU would be active all the time, which would be poor for battery life.

It would be nice if it could be configured to do just that when running on external power, but I don't think that hobbling WebGL is the goal.

[+] AshleysBrain|12 years ago|reply
But they already defaulted it to using integrated graphics before to save battery. It's too far when you can't even change the setting, even when you're on mains power.
[+] nailer|12 years ago|reply
That's already mentioned in the article.
[+] voidr|12 years ago|reply
A web browser should not require more than what an integrated GPU can provide, if you have an app that needs more graphic power, than consider writing proper native app.

I'm a web developer, however I don't like the idea of giving full access to my hardware to any random/untrusted script on the web, because people will abuse it, they will write scripts that will drain my laptop's battery and I people will start disabling WebGL completely which will defeat the purpose of WebGL.

[+] viraptor|12 years ago|reply
The results seem strange. Intel HD 4000 is not a great card, but it's completely capable of running new-ish games on low/mid settings. I wonder if there's something even worse going on (falling back to software rendering?) if it seems to score 10x worse than a mobile phone.
[+] groups|12 years ago|reply
yeah something is wrong. I ran the test on my lenovo x200s with an intel core 2 duo and intel GMA 4500 graphics and got 3700 "objects" and with a "tickcount" of 1400. I'm assuming objects are sprites--the test itself doesn't use the term.

If his HD4000 is getting 1250 objects, I shouldn't get 3700.