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When I play full-screen 1080p@60fps Youtube videos in Chrome (with MagicActions extension), my i5-4570T CPU hovers around 35-45%. Playing the same video in Edge takes up only 10% of CPU. Both use the same avc1.64 codec in HTML5 per "Stats for Nerds". Here is the video in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VurowmlQNzQ along with a screen shot of running stats:

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What's the reason for such a drastic difference? Chrome used to be light and fast but has become a resource hog.

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  • Chrome or the extension? Are there other extensions you can compare? Extensions can be coded badly and execute badly.
    – Fiasco Labs
    Commented Mar 12, 2016 at 17:31
  • @Fiasco It's worse without an extension because then Youtube pushes vp9. It's approximately the same with h264ify extension that does pretty much the same without bells and whistles of MagicActions. Both are highly rated extensions. I googled around and found more than a few other users complaining about this but no solutions. Chrome's support forum wasn't helpful at all.
    – A.S.
    Commented Mar 12, 2016 at 17:40
  • Any chance of a link to a video that causes this so that we can compare?
    – Mokubai ♦
    Commented Mar 12, 2016 at 18:14
  • Yuck, listen to the fans spin up as the video plays...
    – Fiasco Labs
    Commented Mar 12, 2016 at 18:30
  • @Moku I ran into the same problems on a much weaker X205T with Z3735F Atom where Edge could smoothly play this very video and Chrome would choke. The difference is there for 30fps videos as well, but obviously not as pronounced.
    – A.S.
    Commented Mar 12, 2016 at 18:36

1 Answer 1

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I looked at the trace with WPA and found that Edge seams to convert everything into its JavaScript Engine,

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while Chrome calls gles2 (OpenGL/ES) and GPU calls:

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Both uses the same CPU amount (6-7%). Chrome uses a bit more CPU because of GPU call overhead, which lead to some more Windows internal calls.

But chrome has a 2nd exe which does the HTML decoding and a 3rd process to handle it's internal messaging loop.

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click to enlarge

enter image description here
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Those 3 processes causes that chrome uses more CPU compared to Edge.

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  • The details are a lil above my paygrade but if I understood your findings correctly, the core processes are executed approximately equally and there is some big extra weight in Chrome. Can this somehow be leveraged into suggestions for developers to improve Chrome? I'm almost sure they are aware of this problem at this moment and I'm baffled as to why it's not fixed. I could understand a factor of 2 in CPU's usage but not a factor of 4.
    – A.S.
    Commented Mar 12, 2016 at 21:27
  • Here is a bunch of other people reporting the same drastic differences: reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3fe29e/… docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/…
    – A.S.
    Commented Mar 12, 2016 at 22:20
  • chrome development was started in 2008, while Edge is newer. Changing the way a browser works internally is hard. Because my Internet speed on youtube is throttled by the German Telekom I always download videos via jdownloader from Youtube and play them locally, so I never have this issue.
    – magicandre1981
    Commented Mar 13, 2016 at 7:33

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