IE 11 WebGL performance slow when using WebBrowser

Question

I'm trying to embed Cesium in a WebBrowser control inside of a WinForms or WPF application (using IE 11). As a test I'm using this link:

http://cesiumjs.org/Cesium/Build/Apps/CesiumViewer/index.html?stats=true

It "works" but is much much slower than using IE 11 directly. In IE 11, everything runs at 60fps; in a simple WPF or WinForms app with the WebBrowser control it runs at 4-6 fps. I've been unable to track down the cause of the problem. This is with a blank Form or WPF Panel with the WebBrowser control set to fill the entire pane. There's no transparency or other issues that I can imagine. I've noticed that going to the above link inside of the Visual Studio embedded browser has the same effect. Does WebBrowser control not JIT JavaScript? Is it a WebGL issue? Is there a way I can debug this to figure out what's going on? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You'll need to change these two reg keys to make it work for all users

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION

For a single user just use

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION

Adding the DWORD make sure you set the value to 11999 and not 11001 as the link below says, and it should set it to IE 11 standards mode. Although it comments that using an invalid value will set it to the latest, so setting it to 99999 will probably work for the next versions.

http://weblog.west-wind.com/posts/2011/May/21/Web-Browser-Control-Specifying-the-IE-Version

Answer 2

Take a look at this article:

As it turns out, the embedded browser uses the IE7 rendering engine by default, even if a newer version of IE is installed. Also, GPU rendering is switched off, so the browser uses software rendering only.

This was fixed by setting the following feature control registry keys:

• FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION – set to the desired version of the IE rendering engine
• FEATURE_GPU_RENDERING – set to 1 to enable GPU rendering.

These keys can be set under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or HKEY_CURRENT_USER for a specific program (executable name), which uses the embedded browser. HKCU is preferred since the program won’t need administrator privileges to write to HKCU.

So when I set FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION to 10000 (for IE10) and set FEATURE_GPU_RENDERING to 1, the performance improved to ~850 fishies @ 60 fps. Still not as good as standalone IE with its 1000+ fishies, but quite an improvement!