Browser games, no download: how we hit 60fps on cheap phones

A browser game has one unfair advantage — no install, no store, no wallet, just open a tab and play — and one unfair problem: it has to run on whatever device opens that tab. No minimum-spec sticker, no 'recommended GPU'. Here's how we hit a steady 60fps anyway, from building our own WebGL and Canvas titles.

Budget for the slow phone, not the fast one The single most important decision is picking the target device first. We choose a three-year-old mid-range phone and design the render and physics budgets around it — a frame budget of ~16 milliseconds, minus headroom for the browser itself. If the game is smooth there, it's smooth on the flagship someone tests it on later. Do it the other way around and you ship something that only feels good on the machine it was built on.

Where the frames actually go Most dropped frames on the web come from a handful of repeat offenders:

• Draw calls — batch and instance everything you can; every state change costs
• Garbage collection — pool objects and avoid per-frame allocations, or the GC will stutter you at the worst moment
• Overdraw and particles — tune counts per quality tier and cap them on low-end hardware
• Layout and DOM — keep the game in a single canvas; don't fight the browser's layout engine mid-frame

A quality ladder, not a single setting We detect rough device capability up front and pick a tier — particle density, resolution scale, effect richness — then let it adapt if frames start slipping. The player never sees a settings wall; the game just stays smooth. Audio is synthesized on the fly where we can, so there's nothing extra to download.

Feel first, once the budget is safe Sixty frames a second is table stakes, not the goal. A technically smooth game can still feel dead. So once the performance budget is locked, we spend the remaining time on the part players actually remember: input latency, coyote time, acceleration curves, screen-shake, the weight of a landing. Performance buys you the right to tune game-feel — and game-feel is what makes someone play a second round.