Chrome WebGL crashing on Ubuntu 16.04

Question

I recently upgraded from Linux Mint 17.3 MATE (Ubuntu 14.04) to Ubuntu 16.04. Before upgrading, WebGL was working correctly in Chrome. Pages with simple WebGL, like get.webgl.org still work, but now trying to access some pages, such as those on GLSL Sandbox, crashes the GPU process and a yellow bar appears at the top of the page that says "WebGL hit a snag." If I crash the GPU process enough times, all of the previously available entries on the chrome://gpu page turn into "Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable" until Chrome is restarted.

How could I fix this issue?

I am currently using Chrome 50.0.2661.94 51.0.2704.63 and NVIDIA proprietary drivers 340.96 361.45.11.

Here is a snapshot of the chrome://gpu page before I crashed the GPU process: https://cdn.rawgit.com/as-com/6925415da9554028940d6fd77abbcd79/raw/ab952209f48d8e18efdc42325dda0f0872263eac/gpu.html

Here is the page after I've crashed the GPU process a few times: https://cdn.rawgit.com/as-com/6925415da9554028940d6fd77abbcd79/raw/48c904c6ed2227b34bd99047e01d1573c6a4f2c2/gpu2.html

Things I have tried

• Rebooting (several times)
• Different versions of proprietary NVIDIA drivers (361.42, 340.96, 358.16, 364.19, 304.131, and 361.45.11), some from this PPA
• Resetting my custom flags in chrome://flags and enabling/disabling the override option

Additional Information

• Chrome's GPU process freezes and crashes even when I open the developer tools, which is really annoying

Solution

The combination of Chrome version 52.0.2743.116 and NVIDIA drivers 361.45.18 has fixed the crashing issues with WebGL. I may be wrong, but this commit looks related to fixing the issue.

Comments

[Andrew Sun]

That's interesting. I assumed that I didn't need to go any lower because 352 was working fine on 14.04. Are there any performance implications of using such an old driver version?