Nightguest
Ex-Team Member
Hello there everyone,
As some of you will know through experience, recently there has been a host of issues for players that are using a browser that is based on Chromium. For those that do not know, Chromium is the open-sourced browser project that most of the popular browsers develop from. Therefore an update to Chromium will impact the actual browser that you use.
Browsers that are affected are:
Note: Some older Nvidia and Intel Integrated graphic solutions are also blocked, though the recent addition of the AMD graphics cards to Chromium's block list with Google Chrome's version 86 seems to cause the majority of issues right now.
With hardware-acceleration disabled, it is your CPU that has to handle rendering the game, and when compared to a graphics card, this is a much more inefficient solution - essentially, the CPU cannot do what the Graphics card does to the same degree of performance and efficiency. This ultimately causes the game to load very slowly, lag while in-game, or in some cases, not load at all.
Pre-GCN Graphics tend to be: AMD HD6000 and 5000 graphics cards, the lower end HD7000 discreet graphics cards and all AMD APUs that were launched before the A4/6/8/10 7XXX processors.
For those that understand PC Hardware a bit, they will probably realize that this block is due to the drivers, and that is correct. From what we have been able to determine, the blocklist blocks all drivers that use Windows Graphics Driver Version 8.17.x which include ALL of the drivers launched for the AMD Pre-GCN Graphics Cards. Unfortuantely, this also includes the Crimson Beta Drivers.
The actual AMD Graphics Driver version numbers are 15.7.1 (stable) and Crimson ReLive 16.2.1 (Beta) - and earlier.
It is possible to disable the blocklist via chrome flags and force Hardware Accerleation back on, however, in our testing (both our own and with the help of some community members), we discovered that this causes the browser to crash very frequently and sometimes forces a hard system restart (this lead me to believe that there was an update to how Chromium handles Hardware Acceleration, but I cannot confirm that at this time). Therefore we cannot recommend that you use this solution.
What we have found, however, is that Firefox continues to work perfectly fine, and so if you are on an older system that is affected, we recommend that you use Firefox to play.
Please note: on supported systems, Google Chrome usually offers slightly better performance than Firefox, which is why we do not generally recommend to switch to this browser to play our game unless you are unable to play using the Google Chrome browser.
We are really sorry for this situation and we are doing our best to see what solutions we can implement, however, this may be something that is out of our hands as it involves Graphics Cards that are no longer supported.
For some further troubleshooting tips, please check out this article in our knowledge base, which will also allow you to easily contact our Support should you need help with any of the steps listed. We thank you for your patience while we're investigating our options!
As some of you will know through experience, recently there has been a host of issues for players that are using a browser that is based on Chromium. For those that do not know, Chromium is the open-sourced browser project that most of the popular browsers develop from. Therefore an update to Chromium will impact the actual browser that you use.
Browsers that are affected are:
- Google Chrome
- Microsoft Edge
- Chromium
- Brave
- Opera
- And many more.
Note: Some older Nvidia and Intel Integrated graphic solutions are also blocked, though the recent addition of the AMD graphics cards to Chromium's block list with Google Chrome's version 86 seems to cause the majority of issues right now.
With hardware-acceleration disabled, it is your CPU that has to handle rendering the game, and when compared to a graphics card, this is a much more inefficient solution - essentially, the CPU cannot do what the Graphics card does to the same degree of performance and efficiency. This ultimately causes the game to load very slowly, lag while in-game, or in some cases, not load at all.
Pre-GCN Graphics tend to be: AMD HD6000 and 5000 graphics cards, the lower end HD7000 discreet graphics cards and all AMD APUs that were launched before the A4/6/8/10 7XXX processors.
For those that understand PC Hardware a bit, they will probably realize that this block is due to the drivers, and that is correct. From what we have been able to determine, the blocklist blocks all drivers that use Windows Graphics Driver Version 8.17.x which include ALL of the drivers launched for the AMD Pre-GCN Graphics Cards. Unfortuantely, this also includes the Crimson Beta Drivers.
The actual AMD Graphics Driver version numbers are 15.7.1 (stable) and Crimson ReLive 16.2.1 (Beta) - and earlier.
It is possible to disable the blocklist via chrome flags and force Hardware Accerleation back on, however, in our testing (both our own and with the help of some community members), we discovered that this causes the browser to crash very frequently and sometimes forces a hard system restart (this lead me to believe that there was an update to how Chromium handles Hardware Acceleration, but I cannot confirm that at this time). Therefore we cannot recommend that you use this solution.
What we have found, however, is that Firefox continues to work perfectly fine, and so if you are on an older system that is affected, we recommend that you use Firefox to play.
Please note: on supported systems, Google Chrome usually offers slightly better performance than Firefox, which is why we do not generally recommend to switch to this browser to play our game unless you are unable to play using the Google Chrome browser.
We are really sorry for this situation and we are doing our best to see what solutions we can implement, however, this may be something that is out of our hands as it involves Graphics Cards that are no longer supported.
For some further troubleshooting tips, please check out this article in our knowledge base, which will also allow you to easily contact our Support should you need help with any of the steps listed. We thank you for your patience while we're investigating our options!
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