AUGH for crying out loud
Upon looking into it further, I discovered that the chrome team has decided to disable hardware acceleration for all systems running XP or vista. Reasoning:
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issu ... ?id=315199
"...the short answer is that we don't have a good way to reliably
ensure that these features work correctly on XP and Vista. We've had a
number of bad bugs that went to stable users without anyone realizing (i.e.
not in our testing nor from bug reports), and fixing those bugs is very
difficult because reproducing the relatively exotic hardware configurations
involved is next to impossible. Without that good testing / feedback loop,
ensuring we don't break Chrome is difficult enough that we're playing it
safe rather than risking it.
It's also worth noting that many (though not all) WinXP and Vista machines
are old enough that they don't really benefit from hardware acceleration
features. WebGL and Stage3D do, mostly, but we use the GPU for all pages on
Win7+ and all other Chrome platforms (well, except Linux, but that'll
happen soon). If we moved to that model on XP and Vista, we take a major
compatibility risk as explained above, for basically no gain -- on memory
bandwidth constrained devices there isn't much win here. The model we're
moving to architecturally requires that Chrome is in one bucket (all GPU
feature enabled) or another (all software). Hence, this blacklisting change."
Not just webgl, also flash, video decoding, whatever. All hardware acceleration is off on those OS's. >:(
There are quite a few users still on those platforms, including me. I guess our only option is to either use an earlier version of node webkit or run the game with the blacklist disabled, but if including the argument in the package.json doesn't work, then the only option left is to try to ensure that the player doesn't run the exe by itself, and has to run it from a modified shortcut.
Kinda frustrated.