Chrome browser - Hardware Acceleration must be enabled for Onshape?

andrew_troup

My experiments (trying to speed up a glacially slow Chrome installation on one of my Windows machines, running Win 7x64)
seem to suggest that WebGL relies on Hardware Acceleration being enabled (Chrome browser: Settings/Advanced)

Whenever I disable it, my Onshape documents fail to open.

So for those of us for whom hardware 'acceleration' actually causes a drastic slowdown of Chrome, (as it quite commonly seems to, judging by Google threads), we apparently have to choose between two unpalatable alternatives.

Please correct me if I have this wrong: I would love to be able to resolve this.

robert_williams570

I too have experienced unacceptably slow performance..  

lougallo

Hardware acceleration is needed.  If you type in chrome://gpu you can see the status.  If you are unable to get things running, please hit the ? menu -> Feedback to send in a ticket and we can look further into the issue.

Rift

I'm curious if there was ever a resolution for this? I am having exactly the same problem with the exception that it is only happening on battery power for me. Whenever I unplug my laptop from the wall chrome gets horribly laggy and in turn so does onshape. Disabling hardware acceleration fixes this however I can then no longer load onshape.

No combination of settings has fixed this for me yet.

NeilCooke

@Rift sounds like your laptop may be switching to onboard graphics when you go on battery power. Typically these graphics chips are only good for basic display tasks and no good for any kind of 3D apps. You should be able to set your graphics card in your laptop settings somewhere. 

PeteYodis

@Rift Neil is perhaps correct here.  If you do have a dedicated and an embedded graphics card, there are controls usually provided by the graphics companies to force an application to always use the dedicated graphics card - for example if you are a windows user, the nVidia control panel will allow you to set the preference for each application - in your case you can set Chrome to always use the dedicated or high performance card.

Rift

Hey guys I thought the exact same thing at first however I have selected my Nvidia GPU as the video card to use when I use chrome within the nvidia control panel which doesn't seem to effect anything. Also attempted to change on board settings for the intel chip but no change =/

PeteYodis

@Rift With the laptop running on battery, go here and paste the results of our check page:  https://cad.onshape.com/check

Rift

Attached are some screen grabs of the results plugged in and on battery. The overall performance on battery is much lower according to this. First pic is battery second one is plugged in.

Paul_J_Premakumar

@Rift, This is addressed in our help documentation : https://cad.onshape.com/help/#webgl.htm?Highlight=webgl . See the additional information resources at the bottom. Check out the link: http://alteredqualia.com/texts/optimus/ 

PeteYodis

@Rift The ball of wax may be described here:  http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2014/3/12/5499518/nvidia-wants-to-let-you-play-games-with-your-laptop-unplugged

Rift

@pete_yodis Interesting looking at this right now. I found the battery boost feature but no options yet. Digging further.

Rift

@pete_yodis This did it!!!!!! I can't tell you how frustrating this was!!! Disabling the battery boost feature has removed all the lag I was experiencing.

PeteYodis

@Rift A hearty thanks to one of our graphics developers.  He zeroed in on it quickly.  

Rift

Whomever he is be sure to pass on my sincere gratitude on this one!