WebGl Chrome suddenly not working

Anybody had their WebGl turned off in Chrome recently?

Im not sure why but some update must have either disabled "Override software rendering list", or my system put it into the blocked list. Im pretty sure it always worked out of the box.

I checked Edge and the same thing happened there, which makes no sense since they have different update schedules. The only reason that could happen is if it was a Windows 10 update, which also makes no sense.

Anyway the fix was: flags , Override software rendering list

This is freakishly scary when you plan on selling something that may suddenly stop working without warning...

Check chrome://gpu, which will tell you if there's some kind of graphics driver problem that's interfering with WebGL support.

It's very rare these days to lose WebGL support completely - you usually at least fall back to software rendering, so content keeps working, even if the graphics drivers are completely broken.

It went to software rendering, at 3 fps.

A copy of the gpu report:

dropbox.com/s/88vpub7racek22d/gpu10132020.txt

My system is somewhat older, but not ancient. The final driver update was in 2016.

I run on an older system to ensure that what I produce will work on older systems.

I understand this extreme of a change for mobile, but for desktop it is heavy handed.

I had the same problem a few days ago. After shutting down and restarting windows it resolved itself. I didn't understand the cause.

The report mentions a AMD Radeon HD 7480D GPU, which from a quick search looks like it was released in 2012. So it's fairly old hardware.

The problem with old hardware with no further driver updates, is if there's some kind of driver bug causing a serious problem like a crash or a security issue, the manufacturer is not going to fix it any more. Some bugs can manifest seemingly randomly or can be too complicated to feasibly work around. So in that case rather than leave Chrome subject to crashes or security problems, they probably just add it to the blocklist and then it gets software rendering.

Broken drivers have been a plague on the industry for years. If the manufacturer stops supporting their hardware then they can end up leaving it broken and then there's not much anyone can do. Long-term, the move to the newer graphics APIs like Vulkan and Metal will mean simpler drivers and so hopefully fewer such broken-driver problems - but that's little help to old hardware.

Firefox ran as usual, a janky 54-60 fps.

I think I got it. My laptop is also old. and today i deleted google chrome and installed it again. Then this problem occurred. It was working without any problems.