Turn on Use graphics acceleration when available and press Relaunch.
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
Open edge://settings/system (Settings, System and performance).
Turn on Use graphics acceleration when available and press Restart.
Check edge://gpu for "Hardware accelerated" next to WebGL.
Firefox
Open Settings, General, and scroll to Performance.
Untick Use recommended performance settings, tick Use hardware acceleration when available, then restart Firefox.
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
Checking…
WebGL parameters and extensions
Checking…
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.
Frames per second at 1920 × 1080, offscreen. Higher is faster. Compare runs on the same device: plugged in and on battery, before and after a driver update, or between browsers.
Run
Median
Frame time
Slowest 5%
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 CtrlShiftEsc 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 WinR, 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.
What the WebGPU test checks
WebGPU is only really working when a page can get an adapter, create a device and run work on it. This test does all three: it asks for an adapter, draws a triangle into the canvas and into a small texture it reads back, and runs a compute shader that doubles 4,096 numbers and adds one, then checks every result. Both checks show passed when the GPU did the work correctly.
The heading tells you where you stand:
WebGPU is supported: the adapter works, with the features and limits listed below.
WebGPU works, on a software adapter: the browser gave a fallback adapter that runs on the processor. Apps will run, but slowly.
WebGPU is available, but no GPU adapter: the API exists but the browser won’t hand out an adapter; the fixes are in the FAQ.
WebGPU isn’t supported here: the browser has no navigator.gpu. WebGPU also needs a secure (https) page.
Reading the adapter details
The adapter table shows the vendor and architecture the browser reports (for example amd and rdna-3), and on laptops with two GPUs also the high-performance adapter when it differs. Optional features lists what goes beyond the core API, such as shader-f16 (half-precision shaders, useful for AI models), timestamp-query and the texture compression formats. Limits shows the largest textures, buffers and compute workgroups your adapter allows; web apps that need more than the defaults request them, and fail on adapters below them.