Under windows, WebGL makes use of DirectX Runtime or OpenGL runtime?

Question

Under windows, there are two main 3D libraries. I am wondering WebGL use which? is it configurable? Is it configurable per browser?

Answer 1

Google Chrome and Firefox will by default make use of ANGLE wrapper to convert OpenGL API calls to Direct3D 9.0 (to achieve better compatibility with most hardware). Users can change this default behavior but it seems to be very inconvenient to override this (currently it's not possible to change this settings programatically).

All other major browsers (on windows) will use OpenGL.

Answer 2

I am wondering WebGL use which?

Depends on the browser and the OS.

is it configurable?

Depends on the browser.

Is it configurable per browser?

You mean JavaScript? No.

But why do you care?

Chrome and Firefox use ANGLE so that they work out of the box on a Windows system with only the default drivers supplied by Microsoft installed. For a proper OpenGL implementation installed the user needs to have downloaded and installed the original drivers from the HW vendor. If not, all you get is a rather crappy OpenGL-1.4 implementation/emulation built upon Direct3D 9.