Google appears to be developing a way to improve CPU, GPU, and RAM performance in Chrome and Chromium derivatives. The new feature, being referred to as RawDraw, would reduce the strain on system resources by changing the way pages are constructed and only rasterizing necessary parts.

When the Chrome browser rasterizes its output it's choosing the specific pixels to use to draw that page. The browser begins by dividing a page into a grid of tiles of about 256 x 256 pixels each, then allocating resources to those individual tiles. While that process saves Chrome from having to recompute an entire webpage for every single frame that a user interacts with it (or if there's a multimedia element that's playing) the current method could still be improved.

Individual page tiles can be fairly resource-heavy on modern, high-resolution displays, sometimes taking up to 10MB of RAM each. If you imagine the multiple tile resources needed for a single webpage, and then extend that across all the tabs you have open in Chrome, it adds up fast. But now a new approach to the issue of rasterization is in the works, and developer posts on chromium.org show that a prototype of a tool called RawDraw is being worked on.

With RawDraw, the process (called Viz) responsible for using the GPU to rasterize the screen no longer allocates textures for each tile. This lessens the load on memory and the CPU, so the GPU can re-raster needed tiles quickly. That has the potential to reduce what needs to be rendered by up to 90%. The RawDraw tool is technically accessible right now using Chrome flags, but you'd have to be pretty bold to investigate it much in its current state.

chrome:flags#enable-raw-draw

That's because right now the feature is still highly unstable and enabling it is going to result in all sorts of errors, like Chromebooks being forced to do a powerwash (factory reset) to get them operational again and rendering issues on Chrome for Windows. We're looking forward to seeing the tool working soon in a more stable form that will hopefully lessen feelings of Chrome sluggishness and provide smoother and less resource-intensive browsing.