Force the use of dedicated GPU

Unity Engine
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1

When I run webgl content on my laptop, the content uses the built-in intel GPU (to the max!), rather than using the dedicated GPU. Is there anyway to force the use of the dedicated GPU from the website side?

(You can force through power and nvidia settings a certain GPU to be fully used by a web browser, but that is not ideal for end users to have to do)

2

Which Unity version are you using? I recall this was adjusted in some Unity version, although I don’t exactly remember which.

If that is not somehow working, you should be able to explicitly force that by setting

config[‘powerPreference’] = ‘high-performance’;

in the config object for createUnityInstance, see Unity - Manual: WebGL graphics

1 Like
3

This was with 2019.4.24, will check on it thanks - edit: seems different, can it be done on 2019 LTS?
This was previously a big stopping block with webgl, along with Mac Safari complaining about energy use! - though they may have changed that now.

4

@jukka_j seems like fix in 2020.1.15 but I don’t get the back port in 2019 LTS so was that bit backported?
can I force in 2019 and how?

  • WebGL: Added support for PVRTC and RG16 textures. Enable use of high-performance WebGL GPU powerPreference. (1187965)
5

You should be able to force it by explicitly setting the powerPreference in context creation attributes.

See 2019.4 documentation at Unity - Manual: WebGL Graphics

UnityLoader.instantiate("unityContainer", "%UNITY_WEBGL_BUILD_URL%", {     Module: {         "webglContextAttributes": {"preserveDrawingBuffer": true, "powerPreference": "high-performance"},     } });
6

the documentation does not explain that particular attribute, which does not seem to work like that.
Well I guess I have to try 2020

7

Agreed, the documentation is not quite general here. The name “webglContextAttributes” there maps to the official WebGL specification and its “webglContextAttributes” field at WebGL Specification . So it should be possible to configure any context attribute field from there.

8

It’s an old issue, but I found that on Windows laptops by default it won’t let apps decide the GPU to run on (and defaults to the integrated one instead of the dedicated one), so these changes didn’t have any effect for me.
You need to go to Windows Settings > System > Display > Graphics, press Add desktop app, and find your browser executable (in my case C:/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/firefox.exe) once you add it, expand it’s options and set GPU performance to the High Performance (and name of your GPU in brackets).
Also for Firefox specifically you might need to navigate to a page about:config and set webgl.enable-privileged-extensions flag to true.
P.S. Remember to restart the browser after these changes.