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Comment by bjourne | Hacker News Reader

Looks nice but runs at awfully slow 4-5 fps on my Ubuntu 64bit system. Is Radeon HD 4200 to weak for WebGL or is there something you need to configure?

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Sounds about right. I get up to 11 fps on Ubuntu 64bit on an AMD E-350/Radeon HD 6310 system fullscreen on 1366x768 with the catalyst drivers and hidden GUI and a quick search for benchmarks seems to indicate that it is about twice as fast as the HD 4200 ( http://www.notebookcheck.com/ATI-Radeon-HD-4200.20492.0.html ). You may get a few fps by switching to the proprietary drivers if you do not yet use them, but I wouldn't expect wonders.

[Edit:] And I see up to 13 fps if I fly away from the sun, the author seems to be right when he writes "Calculating sun visibility the geometric way (by casting rays through the terrain and the clouds) can be expensive if not done carefully."

I think it's an issue with hardware acceleration on Linux :(

Runs super smooth 60 fps on my Thinkpad with Nvidia Quadro 2000 on Windows 7. Very well done.

JustFYI, I'm getting an excellent 40fps-70fps. Thinkpad E420 (intel GPU) running 64bit Linux Mint 14

$ uname -a Linux XX 3.5.0-17-generic #28-Ubuntu SMP Tue Oct 9 19:31:23 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Did you install specific drivers for it? I'm using a Thinkpad T420 with xubuntu and i only got 12-13 fps in Chrome 24.0.1312.52.

edit: Ok, I figured it out, it's because I used an external 1920*y display, if I resize the window it gets faster.

I'm getting 40fps on a 2012 Macbook Air using Chrome so I doubt its a lack of GPU power, more likely an issue with drivers and/or the compositor.

my retina mbp is getting ~20 fps, seems strange that your air would get double.

A retina display has to render 4x the pixels of a regular display, so the slowdown isn't too surprising. Same reason why drawing operations were actually faster on the iPhone 3GS than the 4 after the latter came out.

I played with it more and the UI windows seem to make a huge difference, with them all open it drops to around ~25-30fps or so. I probably had only a couple open to get the original 40fps number. With all the windows closed on the air it actually gets right up to 60 fps. I'm leaving everything at the default settings, enabling 'flying mode' and just leaving it flying straight.

I also tried it on my 'mac' desktop with is an i7 920 @ 4.1Ghz with a nvidia 660Ti running OSX, also using chrome and with all windows open it only does ~40-45fps but pegs at 60fps again with them closed.

Resolution probably makes a big difference also, on both machines I have the chrome window 'maximized' but the desktop has 1920 x 1200 monitors vs the air's 1440 x 900 screen. I'm not sure how webgl handles retina resolutions, it's also possible the nvidia gpu isn't kicking in for some reason, assuming your on the 15" rmbp.

Runs well on my machine (32-bit Ubuntu, NVidia drivers, Firefox). You shouldn't need to configure anything for it to be fast in general (if it's blacklisted, it won't run at all), but non-NVidia drivers on Linux can be slower in some cases. Do other WebGL demos run ok for you?

Actually I have to set Chrome to ignore blacklisted gpu:s to get it to run at all. WebGL performance is horrible but other 3d games run decently.

Gentoo 64-bit here, Radeon HD 4350 and managed to get 20-30 fps depending. (git versions of Mesa, libdrm, xf86-video-ati, and a recent kernel, all of which are probably required to get best HW rendering, unfortunately).

60 FPS here, Ubuntu 64, nVidia GTX 660. Cool demo, thanks. For most people though I doubt they will have good video hardware so I think 3D in the browser is still several years of for the everyday user.

Surely the bottleneck is on the CPU for any system bought in the last couple of years? Keeping the GPU fed is going to be the challenge with WebGL.

A solid 60fps here with the GUI hidden.

http://i.imgur.com/F04X6D8.jpg

Build?

Retina MBP with 16GB of RAM. All system updates, Chrome Dev Channel.

Runs pretty well on my Ubuntu 12.10 32bit laptop FWIW. Took me a while to get the drivers right but now most WebGL is snappy.

60FPS with info windows turned off on a maxed out late 2012 iMac.

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