Fixing OnShape 3D Modeling & YouTube Stuttering

Overview

Is your Chrome browser struggling with 3D modeling in OnShape or dropping frames on YouTube HD videos? I discovered the fix: Chrome’s “override software rendering list” experimental flag. This transformed my laptop’s OnShape performance from an unusable 0.4 million triangles/second (4 FPS) to a buttery smooth 62.7 million triangles/second (60 FPS). As a bonus, it fixed YouTube playback too - no more dropped frames on 1080p or even 1440p videos. One checkbox, massive performance improvement.

Key Moments

• Initial problem: OnShape running at 4 FPS instead of 60 FPS on AMD Radeon HD 7640G
• Testing WebGL performance: 0.4M triangles/sec vs expected 50M+
• First attempt: Updating AMD drivers (didn’t help)
• The solution: chrome://flags “override software rendering list” flag
• Results: 62.7M triangles/sec, hardware acceleration enabled
• YouTube benefit: 1080p and 1440p now playable without dropped frames
• Checking chrome://gpu to verify hardware acceleration status

Full Transcript (Edited)

Hey there, today I’m going to be seeing if I can fix a problem that I’m seeing with this computer. You can see here this is a 3D modeling software online, it’s a WebGL-based tool to create models for 3D printers. This computer is supposed to be a bit faster than this, but it’s pretty slow when it comes to rotating this 3D model. It’s supposed to be buttery smooth, so I’m going to see if I can fix that.

[Testing begins]

The first thing I did actually was try to run a benchmark. Luckily this disc CAD software OnShape has a little check utility online that loads this page and then checks if your browser is compatible with OnShape. It also does a little benchmark to see how your 3D card performs.

As you can see, this little arrow here, this computer is barely making it with 0.4 million triangles per second. This is supposed to be like in the 50 million plus range. So I’m suspecting that there’s a driver issue, and the reason I’m suspecting that is because I actually just allowed Windows 10 to install the driver for this laptop, for the video chip. It’s got an AMD Radeon HD 7640G, which I would expect would do a decent job in 3D rendering. But this is the one that came built in with Windows, so maybe there’s some room for it to improve with this driver.

[Attempts driver update from AMD]

All right, so this was pretty straightforward. I went to the AMD drivers and support page and I just clicked on here to download the Windows 10 driver. I downloaded a very minimalistic 46 megabyte driver and now it’s trying to see if it finds the hardware. Sometimes it doesn’t find the hardware when you’re dealing with slightly older computers because vendors like to keep their drivers lean. But in this case it looks like it found something.

[After driver installation]

All right, here’s what happened. Check this out! I didn’t actually have to update the drivers. I found some posts online and I went to the flags. So if I go to chrome://flags, they have a setting called “override software rendering list” and I put that to enabled, then restarted Chrome.

And now I’m getting 62.7 million triangles per second and 54.2 million lines per second! In the GPU settings I’m seeing that hardware acceleration is being used. So now I’m going to load one of those models and take a look.

[Tests OnShape]

All right, moment of truth. Okay, now it’s being shown without that black background and if I rotate it… oh look at that! That is buttery smooth. Yeah, problem fixed! Now this laptop is actually useful for this purpose.

[Tests YouTube]

Another great side effect of changing that flag is that now I can actually play YouTube videos in HD. This is 1080p, so you can see here it’s 1920x1080 at 30 frames per second. Before I was dropping a lot of frames. Now with the flag set, video decode and encode is hardware accelerated.

As you can see here, it’s not dropping frames anymore. It’s going very smooth. The video is playing correctly and no more dropped frames. Those two you can ignore - that’s just happening when the video was first loading.

That’s another great improvement. This laptop now plays HD video from YouTube. 4K though, if I go up to 4K it does start struggling. Let’s see if 1440 is going to cut it… It is dropping some when it started, but as you can see here it’s actually not dropping anymore once it’s playing. So it’ll do 1440p.

The fact that this was barely playing 1080p before and now with that little checkmark in the flags I can almost play 4K - that’s pretty good.

I hope that helps you if you ever find yourself with an older laptop that is struggling but you know that it could do better. This AMD Vision C quad core CPU with an AMD Radeon onboard should be able to do HD video and should be able to do WebGL in high performance.

Let me know if this helps. If you like this kind of stuff, hit the like button and let me know in the comments if you found this useful. Thank you!