Chromebooks issued by schools are built to a price. Four gigabytes of memory, an integrated graphics chip, and a processor chosen for battery life. That is completely fine for most browser games and completely inadequate for a few.
What runs fine
- Puzzle, card and board games. These are usually plain HTML and JavaScript and barely touch the graphics chip.
- 2D canvas games — platformers, shooters, physics toys. A canvas game drawing sprites is cheap.
- Text and turn-based games, which use almost nothing.
- Most io-style multiplayer games, which are 2D and designed for weak hardware because that is what their audience has.
What struggles
- WebGL 3D games — driving games, first-person shooters, anything with lighting and shadows.
- Unity WebGL builds, which are large, memory-hungry and slow to start even on good hardware.
- Emulated console and DOS games, which are keyboard-driven and often assume a real machine.
- Anything with a long loading bar. That bar is usually a multi-megabyte asset bundle being decompressed into memory you do not have.
How to tell in five seconds
If a game shows a black rectangle, a stuck loading bar, or a message about your browser not being supported, it wanted hardware acceleration and did not get it. That is not a broken game. It is a game that does not suit the device.
We hit this constantly when testing. A game that renders perfectly on a laptop shows a browser not supported fallback in an environment without proper graphics support, and the two are indistinguishable unless you know to look.
A black screen is usually a graphics problem, not a broken link.
A note on memory
The most common cause of a Chromebook stuttering is not the game. It is thirty other tabs. Browser games run in the same memory as everything else you have open, and a 3D game will happily ask for a gigabyte. Closing tabs fixes more performance complaints than anything else.