SAFARI 15.2 WEBGL performance disaster

Question

Created Dec ’21

Replies 7

Boosts 1

Views 5.5k

Participants 9

recent switcher, I bought a Mac Pro M1 on November 11 and try one of my webgl prog that run fast in Safari.
Some days later, Safari goes slow and I go back to others nav.
I decided to wait next Mac OS release which happens for me yesterday December 12 : version 12.1 Monterey.
Now safari is 15.2 and new tests show a disaster :
A simple move on screen with P5.js of an obj model takes :
7,381s on Chrome, 7,447 s on Edge, 7,330 s on Brave and ... 32,598 s on Safari !
I supposed one day that can comes from external monitors ( I work on a high canvas ), but last tests were done with a reduced 800x800 canvas on computer screen . So wrong path.

is this a known problem ?

thanks

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Answer 1

Numerized OP

Jan ’22

It has been like this for ages ... Deplorable

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Answer 2

Numerized OP

Jan ’22

WebGl on Safari Monterey is a disaster. It's a disaster too on iPads last gen......

1

Answer 3

Bersaelor OP

Feb ’22

Seeing the same issue here. Our test scene used to render at 60fps back in April 2021, now without changing any code it's at 2FPS and my whole Macbook Air freezes.

Test scene: https://test.looc.io/forest/index.html

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Answer 4

mysticdeveloper OP

Apr ’22

Any progress on that issue? Or workarounds? 🤔

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Answer 5

pirla OP

Apr ’22

Following your question, i redo a test on my p5.js application.
I have a watcher in the main loop of my app to detect slow-down.
I set its threeshold at 50 Fps.
On my splash screen webgl displaying a (rather big) plane with a texture:

Chrome stays at 50 and give very rarely some 48, 49 fps.
Safari stays permanently under 11 fps

workaround : download chrome, brave or firefox....

HTH

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Answer 6

Bigpet OP

May ’22

In case anyone else lands here via Google.

The slowdown I've seen is most severe when WebGL 2.0 is enabled.

So if you are in developer mode in Safari you can go to "Develop" -> "Experimental Features" -> untick "WebGL 2.0".

This will significantly improve performance if the page you're trying to view also supports webgl 1.0 (as the demo page posted by Bersaelor does).

Still nowhere near Firefox or Chome performance, but still a 20x improvement in frametime for me in Safari comparing with and and without WebGL 2.0 enabled.

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Answer 7

kokorabashi OP

Nov ’22

This bug is still reproducible on Ventura 13.1.1 and Safari 16.1.1 5 months later. I was wondering if this bug is relating to Apple's implementation of WebGL via Metal. I did an experiment that I run Bersaelor's test scene: https://test.looc.io/forest/index.html on Chrome 107 with metal as ANGELS backend. At last it's still with a freezing screen and 1-2 FPS on my M1 laptop. It seems that it's a Metal bug, and less relevant to WebKit.

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