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I have a old machine with Radeon IGP 340m graphic card. According manufacture spec, it only support OpenGL 1.3 and not support fragment shader, but when i run some WebGL applications in here: http://glsl.heroku.com/ (require fragment shader version 120+) it run succeeded but slightly slow. i don't understand how can Google Chrome do it? Is it compile and run shader in software?

Mortennobel
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Bình Nguyên
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1 Answers1

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The reason is that WebGL in Chrome and Firefox on Windows does not use OpenGL, but rather DirectX for rendering.

They both use the ANGLE-library (Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine) that translats OpenGL ES 2.0 API calls to DirectX 9 API calls.

See more here: http://code.google.com/p/angleproject/

If DirectX 9 is not available Chrome on Windows uses a software renderer called SwiftShader ( http://transgaming.com/swiftshader ).

See more on this here: http://blog.chromium.org/2012/02/gpu-accelerating-2d-canvas-and-enabling.html

Mortennobel
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