Should I force enable hardware acceleration in the browser?

Question

Neither firefox nor chromium have hardware acceleration enabled by default right now. Firefox 4 has an option its registry to force it: layers.acceleration.force.enabled , which is by default set to false.

Having passed all but 3 of 800 tests run by the grafx bot, I thought it reasonable to set the above registry entry to true. However I get a terrible score in the FPS test at the mozilla hardware acceleration stress test. But it doesn't seem to give any problems in normal usage.

Similarly gpu acceleration can be enabled in Chromium 10 by navigating to about:flags and checking the option. So, should I enable it or not?

Solution

I have it enabled on both on my system. However, since mileage may vary, I would suggest trying it out for a while before you set it and forget it, so to speak :).

In short, yes.

Comments

[Oli]

For anybody reading this in the distant future: the key has moved to layers.acceleration.force-enabled

[Oli]

I just turned it on and my score went from 60 (my screen limit) to 19... And I have a Nvidia GTX 580 in here. If that's anything to go by, I'd say it's not ready yet :)

[InuYaksa]

As of Chromium 11, enabling gpu-accelerated-compositing gives me a score of 30fps. Also within about:flags are options for an fps counter and a frame to indicate when layers are being accelerated, but disappointingly average webpages seem not to be participating. One benchmark I found that makes use of acceleration is Speed Reading at Microsoft's IE demo page

[InuYaksa]

Using the nvidia 275 drivers from the xswat ppa on 10.04 and using Firefox 6b2 I get 30fps in the stress test now. Only drivers after 270 are supposed to be whitelisted in the new firefox, so rather than manually whitelist the 196 drivers I bit the bullet and upgraded and they work well.

[InuYaksa]

The above was with without acceleration on (according to about:support). With layers.acceleration.force-enabled=1 it's back down to 17. At the time of the original question I only got six fps. The fishtank demo bears out these figures. The most annoying thing for me is that scrolling is still very jerky. A €40 smartphone can manage this! Soon Chromium will have smooth scrolling and Opera is already pretty good so fingers X'd Mozilla.

[InuYaksa]

Chromium 15 is back down 6fps. on a similar windows machine I get 60+ fps

[InuYaksa]

Actually.. if I override the software rendering list on the chrome://flags page I get 60+fps.