856900 - WebGL demos and games are slower on Firefox than on Chrome

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: Graphics: CanvasWebGL, defect)

Description

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Chrome easily hits 60 FPS on this WebGL cherry blossoms demo:

http://www.bongiovi.tw/experiments/webgl/blossom/

Firefox is slower on my MacBook Pro:

* Firefox 19 = ~30 FPS (no flickering)
* Beta 20 = ~30 FPS plus flickering landscape
* Aurora 21 = fluctuates between ~30 and ~50 FPS plus flickering landscape
* Nightly 22 = fluctuates between ~30 and ~50 FPS plus flickering landscape

Comment 1

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0 - beta
Build ID: 20131001024718

The WebGL performance issues can be confirmed on more than one WebGL demos. For example, the following WebGL demos and games run slower on Firefox than on Chrome:
http://apps.playcanvas.com/will/doom3/gangnamstyle
http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6983010/wserv/gexp_pulpo/index.html
http://snailrace.mediacube.at/
http://yagiz.me/zombiesvscow/
http://webglsamples.googlecode.com/hg/aquarium/aquarium.html (8 FPS on Firefox vs 50 FPS on Chrome)

Comment 2

[Paul Silaghi, QA [:pauly]]

Confirmed comment 1 also on Ubuntu 13.04 x64, FF 25b4

Comment 3

[Cornel Ionce [:noni] [Hubs QA]]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0
Build ID: 20131007213254

Confirming the behavior from comment 2 using the same links on Firefox 25 beta 6.
Also, very slow switch to fullscreen and back on http://apps.playcanvas.com/will/doom3/gangnamstyle

Comment 4

[u279076]

Updating status flags to reflect the current state of this bug.

Comment 5

[Mayur Patil]

Also on CentOS 6.4 64 bits

status: FF 26b6 -> affected 

while work nicely in chromium!! 

Possibly it is issue of HTML5 rendering 

here is test for FF 26b6 which has less score compare to Chrome/ Chromium.

http://html5test.com/

Comment 6

[Kelsey Gilbert [:jgilbert]]

This is well-known. The main fix for this will come when we turn on OGL acceleration for linux.
A temporary fix is bug 942302, where we should be able to use pixmaps to get better compositing perf.

Comment 8

[Patrick Martin]

Here is another example, I get an FPS drop of 51 frames per second on my html5 video player going from chrome to FF when viewing a 720p video (chrome had an average of 59 frames per second, firefox had an average of 8 frames per second):

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20328726/hbmp/test.html (not 720p but a performance drop is still visible)

Comment 9

[Erno Kuusela]

I see 5-10x perf differences vs Chrome on Ubuntu:

Ubuntu 12.04 + i5 laptop + nvidia 750M w/proprietary drivers + Firefox 29 gets 38 fps with the classic WebGL Aquarium demo. Chrome 34.0.1847.132 gets 180 fps (no vsync), 5x difference. For http://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_marchingcubes the numbers are 27 fps for Firefox and 275 fps for Chrome (10x difference).

Comment 10

[mahdisml98]

This is a BIG BUG !!!!
Mozilla please fix this !!!!

Comment 11

[Kelsey Gilbert [:jgilbert]]

(In reply to Patrick Martin from comment #8)
> Here is another example, I get an FPS drop of 51 frames per second on my
> html5 video player going from chrome to FF when viewing a 720p video (chrome
> had an average of 59 frames per second, firefox had an average of 8 frames
> per second):
> 
> http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20328726/hbmp/test.html (not 720p but a
> performance drop is still visible)

This is bug 814524.

Comment 12

[Kelsey Gilbert [:jgilbert]]

(In reply to Erno Kuusela from comment #9)
> I see 5-10x perf differences vs Chrome on Ubuntu:
> 
> Ubuntu 12.04 + i5 laptop + nvidia 750M w/proprietary drivers + Firefox 29
> gets 38 fps with the classic WebGL Aquarium demo. Chrome 34.0.1847.132 gets
> 180 fps (no vsync), 5x difference. For
> http://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_marchingcubes the numbers are 27 fps for
> Firefox and 275 fps for Chrome (10x difference).

This is bug 594876 or bug 942302.

Comment 13

[Kelsey Gilbert [:jgilbert]]

(In reply to Jeff Gilbert [:jgilbert] from comment #12)
> (In reply to Erno Kuusela from comment #9)
> > I see 5-10x perf differences vs Chrome on Ubuntu:
> > 
> > Ubuntu 12.04 + i5 laptop + nvidia 750M w/proprietary drivers + Firefox 29
> > gets 38 fps with the classic WebGL Aquarium demo. Chrome 34.0.1847.132 gets
> > 180 fps (no vsync), 5x difference. For
> > http://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_marchingcubes the numbers are 27 fps for
> > Firefox and 275 fps for Chrome (10x difference).
> 
> This is bug 594876 or bug 942302.

Rather, both those bugs are really bug 1010527.

Comment 14

[yar3333]

In my case (slow three.js demo, Windows 8.1 x64) setting gfx.direct2d.force-enabled=true change fps from 12 to 58.

Comment 15

[vincent]

same bug for me, most basic demos are slow in firefox (32). Moreover the framerate depends on the size of the canvas. 

I fixed the framerate problem by setting :
- webgl.force-enabled = true
- webgl.prefer-native-gl = true

now i have same framerates in firefox and chrome

Comment 16

[u279076]

Unfortunately I don't think this bug has gained any traction since it was filed over a year ago. I think what makes the most sense at this point is that we start breaking this out somehow as there are probably multiple bugs at play here. At the very least something needs to be done to make this actionable otherwise there's no point in having a bug on file.

Chris, how do you want to handle this?

Comment 17

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Comment 1 morphed my bug report about the Cherry Blossoms Chrome Experiment into a catch-all bug for all WebGL performance problems. Since this bug itself is not actionable, I agree that it makes sense to close it.

Comment 18

[u279076]

Thank you Chris.

To anyone else following along here, please file separate bugs for specific demos which are considerably slower in Firefox than Chrome. If you can, please provide links to the demos, information about your system configuration (hardware, drivers, etc), and specific benchmark numbers. Also, be sure to include webgl-perf in the whiteboard field.

This will allow us to isolate, investigate, and prioritize the issues separately, and will give us a better idea of the breadth of the issue as a whole.

Thank you