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Hardware Acceleration Test: Is My Browser Using the GPU?

See at once whether hardware acceleration is on, what gives it away, and the exact switch to flip in your browser.

Hardware acceleration

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Turn hardware acceleration on or off

Chrome
  1. Open chrome://settings/system (Settings, System).
  2. Turn on Use graphics acceleration when available and press Relaunch.
  3. Check chrome://gpu: under Graphics Feature Status, WebGL should read "Hardware accelerated". If it says "Software only" with the setting on, your GPU or driver is on Chrome's blocklist: update the graphics driver first.
Microsoft Edge
  1. Open edge://settings/system (Settings, System and performance).
  2. Turn on Use graphics acceleration when available and press Restart.
  3. Check edge://gpu for "Hardware accelerated" next to WebGL.
Firefox
  1. Open Settings, General, and scroll to Performance.
  2. Untick Use recommended performance settings, tick Use hardware acceleration when available, then restart Firefox.
  3. Check about:support: under Graphics, Compositing should read "WebRender", not "WebRender (Software)".
Safari (Mac, iPhone, iPad)

Safari has no switch: it always uses the GPU. If WebGL doesn't work, update macOS or iOS, and on a Mac check that nothing under Develop, Feature Flags was turned off. Every browser on iPhone and iPad uses Safari's engine and behaves the same way.

Brave, Opera, Vivaldi and other Chromium browsers

They share Chrome's setting: search the browser's settings for "graphics acceleration" (in Brave, Settings, System), turn it on and relaunch. brave://gpu, opera://gpu and vivaldi://gpu show the status.

Still off? Check the system
  • Update the graphics driver from NVIDIA, AMD or Intel (on Windows, Windows Update's driver can be months old).
  • Remote desktop sessions and virtual machines often have no GPU the browser can use, so they fall back to software.
  • On Windows, "Microsoft Basic Render Driver" means no graphics driver is installed at all: install the one for your card.
  • On Linux, check that the Mesa or NVIDIA driver is installed (glxinfo -B should not show llvmpipe).

What your browser reports

Graphics card–
Renderer string–
WebGL 2–
WebGPU–
Hardware acceleration–
WebGPU adapter, features and limits

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WebGL parameters and extensions

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Browser graphics benchmark

Renders a heavy fractal shader into an offscreen 1920 × 1080 image, as fast as your graphics card allows, for about 10 seconds. It measures how fast your browser can draw with the GPU, not everything a full GPU benchmark or a game would test.

The scene appears here while the test runs.

How the benchmark works

Each pass runs a Julia-set fractal with 160 iterations for every one of the 2,073,600 pixels, with no early exit, so every pass does the same work. Passes are drawn into an offscreen image and never shown while they are timed, so your display's refresh rate (vsync) doesn't cap the result. The test sends passes in batches of about 30 ms, waits for the GPU to report each batch finished (a WebGL 2 fence or WebGPU's onSubmittedWorkDone), and divides the batch time by the passes in it. The first half second warms the GPU up and isn't counted.

The result is the median over all batches, and "slowest 5%" is the frame time only 5% of batches were slower than. A big gap between the two means the speed changed during the test: other apps, a thermal limit or a power setting. Battery saver, a laptop running on battery and browser energy saving modes all lower the score, and so does anything else using the GPU.

Find the exact model in your system

Your system always knows the full name, even when the browser hides it:

Windows
Press Ctrl Shift Esc for Task Manager, open Performance and select GPU 0 (and GPU 1 on laptops with two): the model is at the top right. Or press Win R, type dxdiag and open the Display tab.
Mac
Apple menu, About This Mac. On Apple silicon the GPU is part of the chip (for example "Apple M3"); System Settings, General, About, System Report, Graphics/Displays lists its number of GPU cores. Intel Macs show the card next to Graphics.
Linux
Run lspci | grep -iE 'vga|3d|display' in a terminal, or glxinfo -B (package mesa-utils) for the device and driver. NVIDIA cards also answer nvidia-smi.
ChromeOS
Open chrome://gpu and look under Driver Information for GL_RENDERER.
Android
Chrome usually reports the exact GPU (Adreno, Mali, Immortalis, PowerVR, Xclipse). The phone's processor sets the GPU: look up the chipset under Settings, About phone.
iPhone and iPad
The GPU is part of the chip, which follows from the model: Settings, General, About shows the model name, and Apple's tech specs page for it names the chip.

How the test decides

Browsers don’t tell a page directly whether acceleration is on, so the test checks three signs, and any one of them is enough to call it off:

  1. The renderer. If WebGL reports SwiftShader, llvmpipe, lavapipe, softpipe or the Microsoft Basic Render Driver, a software renderer is drawing the page on the processor.
  2. The performance caveat. The page asks for a WebGL context with failIfMajorPerformanceCaveat, an option the WebGL specification defines for this case: the browser refuses it when rendering would be much slower than native, which in practice means software rendering. Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers honour it, even when they hide the GPU’s name. Firefox has ignored it by default since version 86, because sites without a fallback broke (Mozilla bug 1678652), so in Firefox the test relies on the renderer name.
  3. WebGPU’s fallback adapter. Where WebGPU exists, the adapter says whether it is a software fallback.

On means none of the signs appear and WebGL names a real GPU. Probably on means the name is hidden (a privacy setting) but the browser, which does report caveats, reports none. Can’t tell means Firefox with the name hidden: neither sign is available, so check about:support, where Graphics, Compositing reads “WebRender” with acceleration and “WebRender (Software)” without. Off: WebGL is blocked means the browser gives pages no WebGL at all, which usually comes from the same causes.

After you change the setting

Browsers only switch after a full restart, so close every window, reopen and load this page again. If it still reads off, open the browser’s GPU page (chrome://gpu or edge://gpu; about:support in Firefox): it lists which features are hardware accelerated and, when the GPU is blocklisted, the reason. On a laptop, also check that the browser isn’t set to the power-saving GPU in Windows Settings, System, Display, Graphics.

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