Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Screen refresh issue with Google Chrome on ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650

I was recently confronted with a strange error related to screen refresh on an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 on the latest Google Chrome stable release. My webGL part was working fine but the UI of the web page in particular the second canvas was not refreshed. I could see the result in the WebGL rendering updating however, the UI was not updated. After searching for the solution online, it turned out that the problem was due to the hardware based compositing on my card not working. The solution was to simply add --blacklist-accelerated-compositing to the startup flags to Google Chrome so the whole startup flags that work for my WebGL + Canvas 2D code are Chrome --blacklist-accelerated-compositing --enable-webgl --use-gl=desktop Hope this is useful for others too.