Preface: I have had the chance to play around with a very specific webgl library (the name of which I may be able to reveal in the future. This is not for any NDA reasons – the library is opensource on github). I feel obliged to present my findings here, hopefully in a legible fashion.
Problem 1: the app runs particularly slowly on a chrome browser on my laptop.
I won’t bore you with the troubleshooting, the verdict is that the browser installed is a 32bit browser. As a result, I is programmed to use only 4 GB (out of the possible 16GB) of RAM, which slowed the process down significantly.
Problem 2: I attempted to reinstall chrome (57.0.2987.110 64bit). This time, chrome identifies my GPU (AMD Radeon R7 M370) as a blacklisted GPU. As a result, chrome refuses to hardware accelerate webgl.
Solution: I could override the misidentification by going to chrome://flags and enable Override software rendering list. But a simple reinstallation cleared the problem altogether.
Problem 3: The updated chrome (57.0.2987.110 64bit) no longer supports webgl.getExtension(‘WEBGL_draw_buffers’)
Above is the console.log of the method webgl.getExtension(‘WEBGL_draw_buffers’). Notice how the chrome developer console outputted null.
Solution: Use firefox I guess. In addition to 57.0.2987.110 64bit, I have also tried their canary build 59.0.3054.0 64bit, which does not support the extension either.
Addendum: according to the extension conformance, not supporting WEBGL_draw_buffers is legal.
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