After upgrading to an NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti (Blackwell architecture, released January 2025), WebGL stopped working in Chrome. Sites like webglreport.com showed “This browser supports WebGL 2, but it is disabled or unavailable.”
The system-level OpenGL worked fine (glxinfo showed full OpenGL 4.6 support), so the issue was Chrome-specific.
The Problem
Chrome was running with --use-gl=disabled. You can check this with:
ps aux | grep chrome | grep -oE '\-\-use-gl=[^ ]*'
The RTX 5070 Ti and driver 580.x are so new that Chrome’s GPU blocklist doesn’t recognise them, so it defaults to disabling GL entirely.
The Fix
Edit your Chrome .desktop launcher to add flags that bypass the blocklist and use Vulkan:
cp /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
sed -i 's|Exec=/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable|Exec=/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --ignore-gpu-blocklist --use-angle=vulkan|g' ~/.local/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop
This copies the launcher to your local applications folder (survives Chrome updates) and adds the required flags.
Available --use-angle options
| Value | Description |
|---|---|
vulkan |
Vulkan backend (recommended for modern NVIDIA) |
gl |
Native OpenGL |
swiftshader |
Software rendering (CPU-based, slow) |
default |
Let Chrome decide |
Restart Chrome for the changes to take effect.
Bonus: Restart GNOME Shell without logging out
If your application icons disappear or the launcher gets confused after editing .desktop files:
Press Alt+F2, type r, press Enter
This restarts GNOME Shell in place without closing your applications.