Low fps and high cpu usage on chrome 86 + windows 7

Hi everyone,
I’m writing only to share my frustration and to know if anyone faced the same experience:
with the last update (86) of chrome (the same with edge) on windows 7, WebGL in general (not only babylonjs: i’ve tried also with threejs and unity with similar results) works very very poorly.
i.e. the MarbleTower playground https://playground.babylonjs.com/#3I55DK#0 runs at 4-5 fps with cpu at 100% !!! on mozilla, the same runs at > 30fps with 20% of cpu usage.

The issue seems to be only on win7 (i’ve tried on two different pc) and not on win10.

Any comment???

UPDATE: i filled a bug report on chromium: if anyone has the same issue, please up-vote it 1139285 - chromium - An open-source project to help move the web forward. - Monorail

Hello and welcome,

yeah browsers can be really stressful (I look at you Safari)
That being said, just to be sure, can you check if your hardware rendering in Chrome flags is not turned off?

The hardware rendering is enabled.
I’ve 2 PC with windows 7 and 2 PC with windows 10. We are developing an application using babylonjs and we use to change the browser every few days… with chrome and edge all worked fine till version 85 (better than firefox in my opinion), but with version 86 the performances are catastrophic and the app become unusable!!!. This only on Win7 machines. On Win10 all works fine.
Note that the issue is not in BabylonJS (my guess is at least all WebGL is broken). We obtain similar results also with threejs and unity. It’s easy to reproduce:
ThreeJs: https://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_animation_cloth
Unity: https://linuxreviews.org/static/unity-browser-benchmarks-2018/

ok this is sad. Please keep us posted when the issue will evolve on Chromium side

The issue seems to be related with gpu-blocklist feature of chrome.
Starting from v.86, my graphic card is (badly?) detected as uncompatible, so the real rendering is not hardware accelerated.
An usefull tool to check the actual status of gpu rendering is chrome://gpu
There is also an option in chrome/edge configuration to ignore the gpu-blocklist. It’s available through chrome://flags ( #ignore-gpu-blocklist ). Enabling this feature, the rendering is now fast as v.85!!!

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