Some of you might be familiar with ANGLE. It’s Google’s open-source graphics translation layer. It essentially enables hardware-accelerated rendering. However, Google seems to have axed one of the older translation paths, D3D9, which is affecting some people who used to use that path to fix issues with video playback.
On Windows, ANGLE’s main backends used to be D3D11, D3D9, and others like OpenGL, D3D11on12, etc. Over time, Chrome began phasing out many of these backends. D3D9 is an older translation path that has now been removed from Chrome.
Why does this matter? It’s because there are complaints on Reddit that it was the “only” decent fix for videos being blurry, for some people. The point of D3D9 was to serve as a fallback for problematic drivers. However, that was removed a few months ago, and now it falls back to D3D11 WARP instead.
Despite using relatively modern hardware (12th-gen Intel iGPUs and high-end graphics cards), some people have reported issues; there are problems with video rendering on the default D3D11 path, such as blurry/soft output, flickering, stutter, and more.
Forcing D3D9 used to solve the issue, but now the option isn’t there anymore. We’ve checked for this ourselves, and the image below represents the remaining options.
It’s on the latest version of Chrome, v151.0.7922.109, on Windows. Note: This issue only affects Windows systems.
If you’re affected, you can try switching over to D3D11 WARP, which could be more stable, though it may use up more CPU power. D3D11 uses hardware acceleration via your physical GPU, and the WARP version relies entirely on the CPU instead of the GPU. If you don’t face the issue on non-Chromium browsers such as Firefox, that’s another potential fix.
Your last resort would be disabling hardware acceleration entirely, which isn’t ideal.
It’s unclear whether Google will restore the option or attempt to resolve the existing issues with the current D3D11 system, since there’s no official statement at the time of writing.
In other Chrome news, it appears that they’re no longer experimenting with the Mica look. More on that here.
Sudhanshu K
199 Posts
I have been a consumer technology enthusiast for over 5 years. Thanks to my experience in software beta testing and product reviews, I've understood and learnt a lot about what bugs and issues bother people, and I spend time trying to simplify their solutions. I cover smartphones, software, social media, apps, AI, and most consumer tech gadgets. Actively pursuing a Computer Science bachelor’s degree. I'm mostly active on Twitter/X (@TechWhirlUlt), drop a DM or tag me if you want to share info or connect!