GPU hardware acceleration broken on Chromium 152+ on OCLP MacBook Pro – EGL/ANGLE initialisation failure
ISSUE SUMMARY
Hardware acceleration has stopped working in current Brave on an Early 2013 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro running macOS Sequoia 15.7.9 through OpenCore Legacy Patcher 2.4.1.
Brave opens and functions, but the GPU process fails during initialisation. brave://gpu then shows essentially the entire graphics pipeline as disabled/software-only, including compositing, rasterisation, video decode/encode and WebGL.
The practical symptom that first exposed this was severe dropped frames and stuttering in YouTube, with high CPU load/fan activity. The same video plays smoothly in Safari.
This appears to be a Chromium regression rather than failed hardware, a corrupted Brave profile or a general macOS/OCLP graphics failure. An older Brave build based on Chromium 150 uses hardware acceleration correctly on the same Mac and plays the same video smoothly.
ENVIRONMENT
Hardware:
- MacBook Pro Retina 15-inch, Early 2013
- 2.4 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7
- Intel HD Graphics 4000
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1 GB
- 8 GB RAM
Software:
- macOS Sequoia 15.7.9
- OpenCore Legacy Patcher 2.4.1
- Current Brave stable: Chromium 152.0.7977.64
BEHAVIOUR
Current Brave stable:
- GPU process fails to initialise
- Canvas: software only
- Compositing: software only
- Rasterisation: software only
- Video Decode: software only
- Video Encode: software only
- WebGL: disabled
- WebGPU: disabled
- YouTube video stutters/drops frames
Safari:
- Same YouTube material plays smoothly
- 1080p60 H.264 test played with 0 dropped frames
Older Brave / Chromium 150:
- brave://gpu shows hardware acceleration working
- Same Mac, same macOS installation, same OCLP installation
- Same YouTube material plays smoothly
Latest Brave Beta tested:
- Same GPU failure as current Brave stable
TROUBLESHOOTING ALREADY COMPLETED
To rule out configuration/profile corruption and GPU selection issues, I have already tried:
- Confirmed “Use graphics acceleration when available” is enabled in Brave
- Completely quit/restarted Brave
- Restarted macOS
- Cleared Brave cache folders
- Launched current Brave with a completely fresh temporary user-data directory/profile
- Removed and freshly reinstalled the current Brave application while preserving the existing profile
- Tested --use-angle=gl
- Tested --force_high_performance_gpu
- Disabled macOS Automatic Graphics Switching to force the discrete GPU
- Tested the latest Brave Beta
- Tested Safari
- Tested older Brave / Chromium 150
None of the current Brave/Chromium 152+ tests restore hardware acceleration. The old Chromium 150 build does.
The fresh temporary profile test is particularly significant: current Brave still emitted the following errors before opening in software-rendering mode:
Initialization of all (1) EGL display types failed.
GLDisplayEGL::Initialize failed.
Exiting GPU process due to errors during initialization.
RELEVANT brave://gpu REPORT EXTRACT
Graphics Feature Status
- Canvas: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
- Direct Rendering Display Compositor: Disabled
- Compositing: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
- Multiple Raster Threads: Disabled
- OpenGL: Disabled
- Rasterization: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
- Raw Draw: Disabled
- Skia Graphite: Disabled
- TreesInViz: Disabled
- Video Decode: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
- Video Encode: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
- WebGL: Disabled
- WebGPU: Disabled
- WebNN: Disabled
Version Information
Chrome version: Chrome/152.0.7977.64
Operating system: Mac OS X 15.7.9
ANGLE commit id: 736ed80c7552
2D graphics backend: Skia/152 b6d106297ff9ef2ff8094033695d045e87775581
Driver Information
Initialization time: 0
In-process GPU: false
Skia Backend: None
Passthrough Command Decoder: true
Sandboxed: true
GPU0: VENDOR=0x0000, DEVICE=0x0000
Optimus: false
AMD switchable: false
GL implementation parts: (gl=disabled,angle=none)
GL_VENDOR: Disabled
GL_RENDERER: Disabled
GL_VERSION: Disabled
Direct rendering version: unknown
Problems Detected
-
WebGPU has been disabled via blocklist or the command line.
Disabled Features: webgpu -
Accelerated rasterization has been disabled, either via blocklist, about:flags or the command line.
Disabled Features: rasterization -
Accelerated video encode has been disabled, either via blocklist, about:flags or the command line.
Disabled Features: video_encode -
Accelerated video decode has been disabled, either via blocklist, about:flags or the command line.
Disabled Features: video_decode -
WebGL has been disabled via blocklist or the command line.
Disabled Features: webgl -
GPU compositing has been disabled, either via blocklist, about:flags or the command line. The browser will fall back to software compositing and hardware acceleration will be unavailable.
Disabled Features: gpu_compositing -
Accelerated 2D canvas is unavailable: either disabled via blocklist or the command line.
Disabled Features: 2d_canvas -
GPU process was unable to boot: GPU access is disabled due to frequent crashes.
Disabled Features: all
Dawn adapter detection
Metal backend - Intel HD Graphics 4000
WebGPU Status: Available
Metal backend - NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M
WebGPU Status: Available
This is notable because Brave/Dawn can see both physical GPUs as Metal adapters, yet the Chromium GPU process cannot establish its normal graphics context.
Video Acceleration Information
Decoding:
Encoding:
(Hardware video decode is not available to the running Brave GPU process.)
Log Messages
Initialization of all (1) EGL display types failed.
GLDisplayEGL::Initialize failed.
Initialization of all (1) EGL display types failed.
GLDisplayEGL::Initialize failed.
Exiting GPU process due to errors during initialization
The sequence repeats when Brave retries the GPU process.
UPSTREAM ISSUE
There appears to be a closely matching Chromium issue:
Chromium Issue 553120490
“Hardware acceleration broken on Intel HD 6000 with OCLP - OpenGL backend removed”
That report concerns different legacy Intel graphics, but describes the same class of failure: hardware acceleration working in an older Chromium version and failing in Chromium 152+ on an OCLP Mac, with EGL/GLDisplayEGL initialisation errors.
My machine has Intel HD Graphics 4000 plus NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M, so this may indicate the problem affects more than one generation of OCLP-supported legacy Mac graphics hardware.
EXPECTED RESULT
Brave should initialise a supported GPU rendering path and use hardware acceleration, as Chromium 150 did on the same machine and installation. If the current ANGLE/Metal route cannot initialise on this hardware/driver stack, a compatible fallback would be desirable.
ACTUAL RESULT
The GPU process fails during EGL initialisation, Brave disables GPU access, and the browser falls back to software rendering for all major graphics features.
REQUEST
Please could Brave investigate this and, if appropriate, link or escalate it to the existing Chromium issue? I can provide the complete unabridged brave://gpu report if additional diagnostic information is required.