Category Archives: Novice Computer Tips

Google Chrome Speed Tips

My apologies for the lack of posts this week, typical to start a blog and not have time to update it. 🙂

Hopefully some of you have taken my advice and switched your browser over to Google Chrome, if not now is a good time to give it a shot and take advantage of the graphics hardware in your system.

Chrome has support for “GPU acceleration”, which allows it to utilize the graphics card to display a website and it’s content rather than the CPU.  This improves performance by not only taking advantage of the graphics hardware  which in most computers that are less than 5 years (or older) is far better at displaying/rendering pages than the CPU, it removes that load from the CPU giving your system more resources to deal with other things going on behind the scenes.  It is after all a graphics card, and they are meant to process graphics.  In some cases utilizing the GPU will improve performance exponentially, so it’s definitely worth a shot to see if it works.

It’s a pretty simple procedure, just go to chrome://flags and find “GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D” and click enable.  Then find “GPU Accelerated Composting” and enable that as well. If you don’t see one, or both, don’t panic.  Chrome is always evolving and features in there seem to come and go.   I’m using a beta build and support for accelerated composting appears to be enabled by default, there is no switch to enable/disable it.  Your mileage may vary.

Hopefully you’ll see an overall improvement in your browsing experience with the GPU features enable in Chrome,  with the way Google works I would expect to see these features set as the default in the future.

If you want to objectively determine if there’s a difference, Microsoft has a great  HTML5 site with a bunch of different resource intensive games and demos.  I like to use their  Galatic benchmark to test my browser performance. Try running that with and without the GPU acceleration options enabled and let us know what kind of results you get.  It’s also a good way to see if that expensive system of yours really has that kick ass graphics card you paid for. 🙂

Thanks for reading, until next time.