Chrome Removes GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D Flag?!

If you've used Chrome and have gone to Chrome://flags you would've found "GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D" Which allowed C2 games to run as smoothly as possible and use the browser's zoom without blurring the graphics. Today, it was removed! Why would they remove that?!

Enabling WebGL gives the same performance boost this used to (maybe a bit better) but the graphics are still blurry since browser's can't control the sampling..or something..I forgot why :< On that topic, will this ever be resolved?

Chrome 18 was recently released and would have silently updated, and it enables GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D by default. It's no longer an experiment, it's a feature now!

WebGL mode shouldn't appear blurry - it's actually the only mode you can control the sampling in (point vs. linear), you can't control that in Canvas 2D mode.

With Chrome 18, you can see your GPU details by viewing chrome://gpu/

Chrome 18 was recently released and would have silently updated, and it enables GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D by default. It's no longer an experiment, it's a feature now!

WebGL mode shouldn't appear blurry - it's actually the only mode you can control the sampling in (point vs. linear), you can't control that in Canvas 2D mode.

That crossed my mind but the graphics are still blurry so I figured it wasn't just turned into a feature. Choosing point sampling didn't work with WebGL enabled back then and it doesn't work now, in any browser. The graphics may be slightly less blurry, but blurry nonetheless D:

Here's a comparison with an old screenshot I had lying around..

-Before Chrome 18 with GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D enabled and WebGL disabled

-Chrome 18 w/ WebGL enabled and point sampling (same with WebGL disabled)

-Chrome 18 w/ WebGL enabled and linear sampling (same with WebGL disabled)

<img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17634050/BQ_Comparisons.png" border="0" />

Tokinsom Hmm. I thought about it and I think there may be a bug in WebGL mode where in some cases linear sampling is still used despite the project setting. Are you using any layers with a nonzero opacity or 'Force own texture'? I'll make a tweak for the next build (should be a beta release today) and see if that helps.

I sure hope it's just a bug ^^; All layers have 100% opacity except the water layer (50%) and none of them use 'Force Own Texture'.

Ok, turns out the graphics are only blurry when zooming in via the browser (Above screen shots were taken at 300% zoom) However, GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D FIXED that (See first screenshot) so I'm still kind of confused..If it's truly enabled by default now, then why would the graphics blur when zooming in?

Anyway, at 100% zoom the only thing that's blurry is tiled background objects, which is kind of odd. Any idea what that's about?

Ultimately I might just have to quadruple the window size and layout scale, but that would of course break parallaxing layers..and still wouldn't fix the blurry tiled background objects :<

edit: And when running the game on my tablet via LAN (Fullscreen scale mode) it's the exact opposite; Tiled background objects are perfectly sharp whereas everything else is blurry.

Headache commencing.

Eh, it's annoying, if you zoom the browser view we have no control over sampling so it will probably just do linear. So you have to view the game at 100% zoom in the browser.

While 'GPU canvas 2D' was an experiment, you can make no guarantees about anything like this, because they may consider the fact it used point sampling as a bug and fix it for the main release.

WebGL still has a power-of-two texture limitation for tiled textures only. So tiled textures will only look perfect at a power-of-two size in WebGL mode. If you switch back to canvas 2D then you have no control over sampling at all.

I know this is a pain and I've been on the standards mailing lists pushing for better control over this, but it's moving slowly.

:

Well if I edit the backgrounds to a ^2 size, quadruple the window size & layout scale, make my own parallaxing backgrounds, and position the HUD manually, I guess it'll be okay. The game will be stuck in 4x resolution however, since you can't change the window size during runtime.

Would you suggest I do that or wait it out and hope for a later solution? The slightly blurry graphics are somewhat tolerable..

edit: lmao even that's blurry. It's not as noticeable though. Probably not worth the trouble..

My best advice is just use WebGL mode with point sampling and make sure your tiled backgrounds are ^2. That is all that should be necessary/can be done.