Making the Google Chrome Speed Tests

These speed tests were filmed at actual web page rendering times. If you're interested in the technical details, read on!

Equipment used:

- Computer: MacBook Pro laptop with Windows installed
- Monitor - 24" Asus: We had to replace the standard fluorescent backlight with very large tungsten fixtures to funnel in more light to capture the screen. In addition, we flipped the monitor 180 degrees to eliminate a shadow from the driver board and set the system preferences on the computer to rotate 180 degrees. No special software was used in this process.
- Camera: Phantom v640 High Speed Camera at 1920 x 1080, films up to 2700 fps


"Why does allrecipes.com in the potato gun sequence appear at once, and not the text first and images second? And why does it appear to render from bottom of the screen to the top?"

Chrome sends the rendered page to the video card buffer all at once, which is why allrecipes.com appears at once, and not with the text first and images second. Chrome actually paints the page from top to bottom, but to eliminate a shadow from the driver board, we had to flip the monitor upside down and set the system preferences in Windows to rotate everything 180 degrees, resulting in the page appearing to render from bottom to top.

"Why does the top one third of the page appear first on the weather.com page load?"

Sometimes only half the buffer gets filled before the video card sends its buffer over to the LCD panel. This is because Chrome on Windows uses GDI to draw, which does not do v-sync.

"The screen wipes are so smooth - how was that achieved?"

The screen wipes up in a gradated wipe because LCD pixels take around 10ms to flip and gradually change color.

More filming details below:

Chrome Browser vs. Potato:
We used a version of the web page allrecipes.com that is accessible when logged in. About four hours into the Potato Gun shoot we decided to use a locally loaded version of the web page to enable more precise synchronization with the potato gun. We finally got the shot we were hoping for after 51 takes.

Chrome Browser vs. Sound:
We loaded an artist page from Pandora.com, a streaming internet radio service directly off the web on a 15Mbps internet connection.

Chrome Browser vs. Lightning:
We used a locally loaded version of weather.com that was legally approved for use in this video (and all the standard website permissions procedures that goes into making videos!)

While we had a super fast 15Mbps internet connection in the studio, any live internet connection introduces quite a bit of variability. To run speed tests on page rendering times, saving locally and loading from the local disk can help reduce this variability.

We'll be releasing the results of these speed tests:
http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/05/pe...

http://www.google.com/chrome

---

Closed Caption:


There's things that happen like
in front of own human eyes
that we never see that are
totally invisible to us.
Speeds on the internet are much
faster than speeds in real
life, most of the time anyway,
so we want fast to mean
something that's immediate.
Most shoots you have a pretty
clear picture of what you're
going to see and what
you're going to get.
I think every step along the
way we weren't sure what
we were going to see.
We are truly running
experiments.
Which is really exciting and--
[POTATO GUN FIRING]
And sometimes they
fail miserably.
Sometimes they surprise
and delight us.
We need to somehow benchmark
what Chrome fast was.
And we wanted to benchmark it
against some things that people
knew were going to be fast.
[SERIES___OF___F
IVE___DISTINCT___SOUNDS]
2,700 frames per second.
When you capture something, a
page downloading at 2,700
frames per second, and trying
to get the shot of a page
loading at the same time as
potatoes are flying
across the screen.
I mean--
[LAUGHTER]
And the fact that it took 51
different takes to get the
potato gun to work just
the way we wanted it to.
[POTATO GUN FIRING]
I think we moved to the
Idaho potato at this point.
They're pretty good for
launching through a
grater at high speeds.
This is our original gun, but
it couldn't fit in the frame.
We rearranged it.
It fires in the
other direction.
The challenge has been to
really measure these things for
real and capture that on film.
So we have to invent ways to
set them off at the right time.
The trigger in this one
is the boot falling from
the top of this frame.
The double-bass pedal hits the
mouse, which clicks Chrome and
then also hits the keytar
key at the same time.
Hits the drum, shoots
the paint into the ear.
That's corn syrup mixed with
acrylic paint to get the
right consistency to stay
together when it's aloft.
What's right frequency, what's
the right volume, the right
kind of speaker, the right
viscosity and density
of the paint itself.
We played around with a lot
of things to set it off.
I mean, just technically,
what could you hit
quickly to make a blast.
Then along came the keytar,
and everything changed
from there on.
[BOOT FALLING ]
We didn't want to keep it
polished and like looking
clean and pristine.
We wanted to feel sort
of the inventiveness
of the experiment.
So it's not so much lab coats.
It's more having fun and
blowing things up and stuff.
[ROLLING SOUNDS]
This is the model SG10 rotary
spark gap Tesla coil.
Electricity is lazy.
It always wants to go to the
nearest grounded object.
So we're going to ground
the pirate ship.
Pass the ground through
this wire to this
ground right back here.
What we've added is what's
called the corona point.
That becomes the spout
that the electricity's
going to flow off of.
We want to have a
big, thick arc.
So I've put two close together
so we can kind of have them
laid up on top of each other
and look thicker on film.
So we're going to end up being
at about 4.2 million volts per
arc, plus you have to take into
account that the arc we're
looking at isn't only one arc.
It's multiple arcs stacked
on top of each other very
densely that you, with
our naked eye, can't see.
Before we do anything with
the Tesla coil we're
going to clear the area.
Everyone is going to stay
behind the human line.
I mean, the fact that we have
a pyrotechnics expert, a
ballistics expert, a Tesla coil
expert on set, that's exciting.
Rather than saying, oh well, we
can fix that later, there's not
been a lot of you can fix that
later about this shoot, which
is the dedication of the team
to actually getting it really
right in camera, genuinely.
And so when you really get
to like sit back and watch
it just evolve in front
of you, it's amazing.
I mean, we don't get to do
that on a regular basis.
[FINAL TAKE]