I have been working with graphic shaders on Chrome. There is a lot that you can do with Shaders alone. If you are running a recent version of Chrome, have a decent GPU in your computer, and want to see what you can do with them take a look at https://shadertoy.com for samples of the type of real time graphics that can be done with them. I will not talk about how shaders work here though. I want to talk about a performance problem I encountered and how I got around it.

I usually use a 27-inch iMac running Windows for day to day work.  The computer has a GPU that was made for mobile computers. Having been manufactured back in 2014 as you might guess it is a pretty weak GPU. To address some of the shader performance problems that I encountered I tried using en eGPU (external GPU). But I did not see the performance gains that I had expected. Shader performance was even worst when I tried running shaders with Chrome on the GTX 1080 that was in the external GPU.

What was going on? I decided to look at the Chromium source code to get an idea for this. Chrom(e|ium) uses a library called Angle for its low level graphics calls. Angle abstracts away the underlying graphics API so that someone can use the same source base for more than one type of device. On Windows machines the low level graphics APIs are generically referred to as DirectX. DirectX is a family of APIs with Direct3D being the set of DirectX APIs focused on 3D graphics. Angle supports Direct3D versions 9 and 11. Chrome uses Direct3D 9 though.

Looking in the Angle source code it did not take long to find the source of my problem. The lines of interest are in the constructor and in the initialize() method. In the Constructor the member mAdapter is set to a value that is used to select the graphics adapter to be used. It is set to D3DADAPTER_DEFAULT. This value usually resolves to the adapter that has the desktop that is marked as the primary adapter. In the initialize() method this value was passed to Direct3D9::CreateDevice.   In my case this was the built-in  AMD Radeon R9 M295X. The shaders were running on this card and the output was being copied over to the GTX 1080 for display. Once I knew this getting the problem resolved was easy. I set the GTX 1080 to the primary display adapter, logged out of my computer, and logged back in. After this performance was great!

It was still possible to get bad performance though. If I moved Chrome back to the built-in display it appears that there were performance penalties from the memory being copied from the GTX 1080 back to the built in adapter. On other machines the penalties might not be as severe.

What does my setup look like? I use the Sonnet eGPU cases (I have got two) and usually have an NVidia GPU in one and an AMD GPU in the other. The Apple computer that I am using does not have the USB-Thunderbolt 3 adapter interface that is used by these cases. I must use a Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 adapter to make this work.