GPU Tester

What a browser benchmark can honestly tell you

This is worth saying plainly, because most online benchmarks do not. A web page cannot measure your hardware. It can only measure how fast this browser, on this machine, right now gets through a particular piece of work — and a great deal sits between that and your components.

• The browser's JavaScript engine is doing the work, and different browsers produce different numbers on the same machine.
• Other tabs and applications compete for the same cores. A background video call can halve a score.
• Thermal and power state matter. A laptop on battery, or one that has been working hard, throttles. The same machine can score forty per cent lower ten minutes later.
• The browser deliberately hides things. Core count is rounded, memory is capped at 8 GB regardless of what is installed, and graphics details are masked in some browsers.

So treat the score as a rough, relative figure: useful for comparing two browsers on one machine, or the same machine before and after a change. Not useful for comparing your computer to someone else's, and no substitute for a native benchmark.

Run it more than once

The first run is usually the slowest, because the JavaScript engine has not yet optimised the code it is about to run repeatedly. Run it three times and take the best.

What this measures

A fragment shader runs sixty iterations of trigonometry for every pixel of a 512 × 512 surface, as many times as fits in the measurement window. The result is a fill rate in millions of shaded pixels per second.

It is a genuine measure of shader throughput through WebGL. It is not a measure of your graphics card in any game, because a game uses a completely different pipeline, different APIs and its own optimisations.

About the reported graphics name

The device panel above shows what WebGL reports as your renderer. Two caveats: browsers increasingly mask this for fingerprinting reasons, and on laptops with two graphics chips the browser usually gets the integrated one rather than the discrete card. A page showing integrated graphics on a machine with a dedicated card is normal, not a fault.

How to use it

1. Close other tabs and applications first. This matters more than anything else you can control.
2. Plug the laptop in if it is on battery. Power saving changes the result substantially.
3. Press run and leave the tab in the foreground — browsers throttle background tabs.
4. Run it three times and use the best. Frame rates vary more than the other tests.

Common uses and tips

• Confirming hardware acceleration is on. A very low fill rate usually means the browser has fallen back to software rendering, which is worth fixing.
• Checking which graphics chip the browser is using on a dual-graphics laptop.
• Comparing browsers, which sometimes differ substantially on the same machine.
• Not for comparing graphics cards. Use a real benchmark for that.

Questions people ask

Does this benchmark my graphics card?

It measures WebGL shader throughput in this browser, which is related to but not the same as graphics performance in a game.

Why does it show integrated graphics on my gaming laptop?

Browsers usually get the integrated chip rather than the discrete card unless configured otherwise. That is normal.

Why is my renderer hidden?

Some browsers mask the graphics name to reduce fingerprinting.

The fill rate is very low.

Often hardware acceleration is off and the browser is rendering in software. It is worth checking your browser's settings.