How to turn GPU acceleration ON in Google Chrome

The Graphics Processor Unit acceleration of the web pages to render their speed loading is a feature that Internet Explorer first flaunted and marketed a lot, but then Google also has given a try about using it in the Google Chrome browser, yet not in any stable version of the browser. The feature enables the 3D CSS and higher performance compositing of the web pages, by taking the advantage of the Graphics Processor Unit hardware.

The GPU function not just does the 3D rendering and better its performance, but also does the betterment of canvas tags with the 2D content in it by rendering the using of the GPU. If at all you wanted to try it out to better the performance of your browser and the opening of web pages, here is how you can turn the GPU acceleration ON in your Google Chrome browser:

Tutorial: Turn GPU acceleration ON in Google Chrome

1. You need to use the Developer version of the Google chrome browser. If you are using the normal version of Google Chrome, you need to first download the Developer version of it for the GPU acceleration to be turned ON.
2. Once you have downloaded and installed the browser, right click on the desktop icon of Google Chrome and then select "Properties".
3. In the Properties window, you would see a "Target" text box. Here is where you would need to add the following text:

-enable-accelerated-compositing

Once you have added the above text, the Target link should appear as following:

"C:/Users/UserName/AppData/Local/Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe" -enable-accelerated-compositing

4. Depending on your browser, click "OK" or "Apply" to save the changes. Then you need to make sure that you don't have any Google Chrome browser window open. Then open the browser from the shortcut whose properties you had modified.

This modified version would have the GPU accelerated composing On. To see how well the GPU's advantage is being taken by the browser, you can visit http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/ and see the changes made. This test drive site was actually made to show how perfectly the GPU accelerating works in making the performance of the Internet Explorer 9, but once you have the same working on Google chrome, you would see the same performance shown by the Chrome browser too.

And other point that has to be noted by learners, the GPU acceleration would be available and working only in the Windows OS, so don't try to make things complicated by trying to see how it works there.

Other resources about GPU acceleration and Google Chrome

• Wikipedia: Graphics Processing Unit - The most common API's for GPU accelerated video decoding are DxVA for Microsoft Windows operating-system, and VDPAU, VAAPI, XvMC, and XvBA for Linux and ...
• Youtube Video: Adobe Flash 10.1 GPU Acceleration Test - I show the results of watching a 1080p video on youtube using adobe flash 10 and 10.1 to show the improvements that have been made.
• Chrome Blog: Taking to your computer with HTML5 - Try it out yourself in this little demo. Today’s beta release also offers a sneak peek of GPU-accelerated 3D CSS, which allows developers to apply slick 3D effects to web page content using CSS...

Posted by Andrew.

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