2012-05-04

Turning Off GPU Acceleration In Google Chrome

I am currently working on a strange device that has a frankenstein mutated version of WebKit. The browser doesn’t support hardware acceleration, so I was looking for a way to turn it off in Google Chrome for debugging purposes.

I ran into this excellent site that lists all of the command-line arguments that Chromium takes, and a few of them apply to turning off the GPU:

• --blacklist-accelerated-compositing: Blacklist the GPU for accelerated compositing.
• --blacklist-webgl: Blacklist the GPU for WebGL
• --disable-accelerated-2d-canvas: Disable gpu-accelerated 2d canvas
• --disable-accelerated-compositing: Disables accelerated compositing
• --disable-accelerated-layers: Disables the hardware acceleration of 3D CSS and animation

Launching Chrome with these options gave me an experience more like the device I am working on, which greatly helped in performance optimization.