How I Solved Chrome GPU Issue on My Linux Mint

How I Solved Chrome GPU Issue on My Linux Mint

I was using Linux Mint with Cinnamon for quite a while. I got tired of cinnamon crashing often and chrome devtools was slow too. I was unable to open lets say 6-8 devtools. It would make my system so slow it bothered me. I remember it was better when I was using windows actually.

First I transitioned to XFCE for desktop environment, hoping it would be better since it is known for its lightweightness.

Then I went ahead and enabled all hardware acceleration flag in Chrome. However there was an issue, Chrome would not render when it is maximized or sometimes when I opened a second window with maximization.

I have MESA drivers on my system so I should be able to use my intel HD4000 ( Ivy Bridge ) GPU for OPENGL.

First I tought maybe my MESA installation was not correct.

I tried uninstalling existing libdrm package. It actually removed many other packages, never do it.

Finally I understood issue was this thing called X11, I dont even know what it is exactly. But it is something like a software bridge between lower gpu libraries and your window manager.

Simply by trial and error and googling everything comes to my mind, I finally found this article.

However file contents was not visible.

I went to archive.org and found previous version.

On my system I did not have 20-intel.conf in my /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ directory. So I created one:

sudo touch /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

And I opened the file:

sudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

Pasted content saved and rebooted.

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "card0"
        Driver      "intel"
        Option      "Backlight"  "intel_backlight"
	Option 	    "AccelMethod" "sna"
	Option      "TearFree" "true"
	Option 	    "DRI" "3"
        BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

Just like this now I can run desktop and browser with gpu support(hardware acceleration).