Hardware acceleration

Why is my board blank or stuck loading?

Kyoso draws boards on your graphics card through WebGPU, a browser graphics API. When graphics acceleration is turned off in your browser, the browser stops offering WebGPU altogether — so there is nothing for the board to draw with. You see an empty canvas, or a board that never leaves its loading state, and Kyoso shows a warning bar across the top of the screen.

This behaves differently from most websites. Elsewhere, switching acceleration off falls back to slower software rendering and pages merely feel sluggish. Kyoso has no software fallback: without acceleration, boards do not render at all. Turning it back on is the fix, and it takes about a minute.

On a company-managed computer? Some browser settings are locked by IT policy. If the acceleration toggle is greyed out, or flips back after you restart, you won't be able to change it yourself — ask your IT department.

Which browsers does Kyoso support?

If your browser or platform isn't listed above, the most reliable choice is the latest version of Chrome or Edge.

How do I turn on graphics acceleration?

Chrome and Edge

1. Open the ⋮ menu (Chrome) or … menu (Edge) in the top-right corner and choose Settings. On macOS you can also use Chrome → Settings in the menu bar.
2. Click System in the left sidebar — or paste chrome://settings/system into the address bar and press Enter. In Edge the section is System and performance, at edge://settings/system.
3. Turn on Use graphics acceleration when available. Some versions label this Use hardware acceleration when available.
4. Click the Relaunch button that appears (Restart in Edge). The change only takes effect once the browser has fully restarted.
5. Reopen Kyoso and reload your board.

Firefox

1. Open the ☰ menu in the top-right corner and choose Settings.
2. On the General tab, scroll down to Performance.
3. Tick Use recommended performance settings — with this on, Firefox enables graphics acceleration for you. To control it yourself, untick it and then tick Use hardware acceleration when available.
4. Restart Firefox and reload your board.

Firefox has platform limits of its own. Even with acceleration on, Firefox does not support WebGPU on Linux or on Intel-based Macs. On those systems, use Chrome or Edge instead.

Safari

Safari has no acceleration setting — macOS manages graphics acceleration for you, so there is nothing to switch on. If a board won't render in Safari, check that you are on Safari 26 or later via Apple menu → System Settings → General → Software Update. If it still fails after updating, open Kyoso in the latest Chrome.

Still not working?

• Restart the browser completely, not just the tab, and reload the board. On Windows, quit it from the system tray too — a lingering background process keeps the old setting alive.
• Update your graphics drivers and your operating system. An out-of-date driver is the most common reason a browser refuses to use a graphics card that is otherwise perfectly capable.
• Check what your browser is actually doing. In Chrome or Edge, paste chrome://gpu (or edge://gpu) into the address bar and find the WebGPU row under "Graphics Feature Status". It needs to read Hardware accelerated. Note that the WebGL row can read hardware-accelerated while WebGPU does not — the WebGPU row is the one that matters for Kyoso.
• Look for a blocked graphics card. If your GPU or its driver is on the browser's blocklist, that same page explains why under "Problems Detected".
• Still stuck? Contact support and paste in the text from chrome://gpu. It tells us exactly what your browser has disabled and why, which is usually enough to answer in one reply.