Getting Geometry Dash to Run Smoothly on a School Chromebook

Geometry Dash is a timing game, so a stutter that would not matter in a puzzle game costs you a run here. The port on this site is a Scratch project rendered on a WebGL canvas, and on a Chromebook that means a few things are worth knowing.

Give the tab the whole GPU

Close other tabs that play video or run games before you start. Chrome shares one graphics context across tabs, and a YouTube tab in the background is enough to make the cube drop frames on an integrated GPU. The Fullscreen button under the player also helps: the browser stops compositing the rest of the page.

Frame rate and timing

Scratch runs at 30 frames per second, so a jump pressed between frames registers on the next one. That is normal and the levels are built for it, but it means the window to hit a jump ring is about a thirtieth of a second — press slightly early rather than late. If the FPS counter at the top of the stage reads well under 30, something else on the machine is busy; wait for it to settle before a serious attempt.

When the jump key stops working

The player has to have keyboard focus. If you clicked anywhere outside the game frame — the comments, the rail of other games, the address bar — Space scrolls the page instead of jumping. Click once inside the game and it comes back. On a Chromebook the Up arrow is often the more reliable key because Space is also the browser's page-down.

Sound

Chromebooks in class are usually muted, and that is fine: the levels are learnable by sight. But if you can use headphones, play each level with sound twice. The spikes are placed on beats, and once you have the song the timing stops being guesswork.

Saving your best

Your best score per level is written to the browser's local storage, which a managed Chromebook may clear at sign-out. It survives a tab reload and a restart of the browser; it does not survive a profile wipe. Nothing on the site sends it anywhere.