video drivers installed, but no WebGL or OpenGL acceleration working

Question

I have a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition with 14.04 (my first serious go with linux outside of a server) and oem video drivers installed, but nothing requiring 3d acceleration is working.

lspci | grep VGA gives me:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Broadwell-U Integrated Graphics (rev 09)

and lshw -c video outputs

  *-display               
   description: VGA compatible controller
   product: Broadwell-U Integrated Graphics
   vendor: Intel Corporation
   physical id: 2
   bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
   version: 09
   width: 64 bits
   clock: 33MHz
   capabilities: msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
   configuration: driver=i915 latency=0
   resources: irq:63 memory:f6000000-f6ffffff memory:e0000000-efffffff ioport:f000(size=64)

modinfo i915 gives me this

filename: /lib/modules/3.13.0-51-generic/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915.ko license: GPL and additional rights description: Intel Graphics author: Tungsten Graphics, Inc. license: GPL and additional rights srcversion: EAE574025ED8FCDDFFC9401 ... deleted for brevity ... depends: drm_kms_helper,drm,video,i2c-algo-bit intree: Y vermagic: 3.13.0-51-generic SMP mod_unload modversions

I enabled WebGL in Chrome as posted in another question and I get a false positive that everything is working in chrome://gpu

Graphics Feature Status Canvas: Hardware accelerated Flash: Hardware accelerated Flash Stage3D: Hardware accelerated Flash Stage3D Baseline profile: Hardware accelerated Compositing: Hardware accelerated Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled Rasterization: Hardware accelerated Threaded Rasterization: Enabled Video Decode: Hardware accelerated Video Encode: Hardware accelerated WebGL: Hardware accelerated

Any guidance would be much appreciated for an ubuntu n00b.

Solution

I had the same issue. Upgrading the Intel graphics driver fixed this issue (among other things):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Then reboot.

You can read detailed explanations on my blog.

Regards,

Comments

[riley]

Just to clarify, when I go to any page with WebGL, the detection fails. So in the three.js examples I get the "your browser does not support WebGL"

[solsTiCe]

I would try another webgl site like developer.mozilla.org/fr/demos/tag/tech:webgl or chromeexperiments.com/webgl because the site you gave does not even resolv here

[Pilot6]

What is the point of upgrading ALL packages, the upgrade specific?

[solsTiCe]

Another way to get up to date graphic drivers is to use ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers. This will not update X that it's advantage. Only graphic drivers.

[Jean-Marc Le Roux]

You're right, using the oibaf PPA does the trick: I've updated my answer and the blog post. Thank you.

[kelunik]

This rendered all gnome apps completely black. Downgraded and removed the PPA again.

[mossman]

I had same poor result as kelunik. Gnome windows black. Didn't solve my opengl problem, just caused more problems. Ubuntu 16.04