Usage of ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript with Chrome when a GPU isn’t available

Description

WebGL is a browser technology that enables hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D graphics rendering. It leverages the user's computer graphics hardware (GPU) to render high-performance, interactive graphics, making it ideal for applications like data visualization. For that reason, ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript uses WebGL2 for rendering. When a web app requiring WebGL runs on a client machine, or a virtualized server instance, that doesn’t have access to a GPU, the browser automatically falls back to software emulation of the GPU by relying on the CPU to handle rendering (which comes at a fairly high cost on the CPU).

As of Chrome 137 (May 2025), the automatic software fallback for WebGL (provided by the SwiftShader software renderer) is deprecated.

Chrome’s original intention was to completely remove support for WebGL when there was no GPU. After feedback from the user community, the Chrome team indicated they are adopting Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP) as the replacement software fallback. WARP is automatically installed with Windows.  As of Chrome 139 (August 2025), this change is being rolled out and at that time was only available to approximately 1% of users. It is still in the experimental rollout phase, and end users may experience intermittent failures where the map won’t display, and errors may occur as well as other unexpected behavior. This deprecation also affects continuous integration systems that are using Playwright and Puppeteer.

As a result of these changes by Chrome, the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript will no longer run on non-Windows platforms that do not have access to a GPU.

Solution or Workaround

To test the WARP fallback, follow these steps:

1. Update Chrome to the latest version. Click the three dots (⋮) in the top-right corner, go to Help > About Google Chrome, and click Update Google Chrome or Relaunch, if an update is pending.
2. Set Chrome to launch with the following flags, for example:

"C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --enable-features=AllowD3D11WarpFallback --disable-features=AllowSoftwareGLFallbackDueToCrashes,AllowSwiftShaderFallback”

3. Open the chrome://gpu page and search for the word “warp”. You should see results similar to the following:

We continue to monitor this situation closely. For more information on detecting and resolving WebGL issues in the browser see this FAQ.