Today Opera has released first release candidate of Opera 12 and we’re assuming final to land soon by tomorrow or on Monday, we came to know that Opera will ship their final version browser with hardware acceleration and WebGL turned off by default. One reason you can easily guess is systems with old GPUs may crash.
But Norwegian based browser vendor is already maintaining blacklist of graphic cards with them, when it detects the graphic card is out-of-date, it will fallback to their software rendering engine Vega. When HWA is turned on in Opera, using GPU Opera renders pages and UI more fastly.
Opera 12 Final Released with Hardware Acceleration,WebGL and Do Not Track Features
Vega renders Pages much speedier than Hardware Accelerated Opera
But Opera feels Hardware accelerated Opera 12 browser has not surpassed their backend rendering engine Vega in speed, that’s why Opera feels shipping a feature that doesn’t boosts its browser’s speed is not needed, hence they disabled it by default, here is how to enable Hardware acceleration and WebGL in Opera 12.
UPDATE: To enable WebGL in Chromium based Opera 44+, visit opera://flags page, type WebGL in the Search box, set ‘Enabled’ for ‘WebGL 2.0 Prototype’.
Enabling Hardware Acceleration and WebGL in Opera 12
1. Set opera:config#Enable%20Hardware%20Acceleration and opera:config#Enable%20WebGL values to ‘1’
2. Save the changes, you need to restart your Opera browser after each setting for changes to take effect.
Now visit Opera:GPU page in opera to see “Hardware Acceleration Status”, if your system’s GPU doesn’t support HWA it will fall back to software backend, Vega and it will be shown in HWA status page.
How to Enable “Do Not Track” in Opera 12
Here you should also know that by default Windows Vista and Windows 7 uses DirectX backend instead of OpenGL backend, this is due to performance and stability reasons. After turning on WebGL, you can try WebGL demo here and here in Opera.
