demo · v146

Video Conference Tier Adapter

The canonical motivating use case from the WICG proposal: a video conferencing app picks a quality preset from the device's CPU performance tier — no proprietary fingerprinting, no benchmark warm-up tax.

Origin trial. The CPU Performance API ships behind an origin trial in Chrome 146. If navigator.cpu isn't present this demo simulates the tier so the conferencing UI still works.
navigator.cpu.performance()
—
reading…
selected preset
—
picked from tier

simulate a different tier:

conference grid (adapts to tier):

you
alex
priya
jordan
sam
mei

the adaptive snippet

// Pick a video conferencing preset from the CPU tier.
const tier = navigator.cpu?.performance
  ? await navigator.cpu.performance()
  : 'mid'; // fallback

const presets = {
  low:  { resolution: '360p',  fps: 15, simulcastLayers: 1, backgroundBlur: false, noiseSuppression: 'rnnoise-lite' },
  mid:  { resolution: '720p',  fps: 24, simulcastLayers: 2, backgroundBlur: true,  noiseSuppression: 'rnnoise' },
  high: { resolution: '1080p', fps: 30, simulcastLayers: 3, backgroundBlur: true,  noiseSuppression: 'rnnoise-full' },
};

applyPreset(presets[tier]);

Before this API, video conferencing platforms shipped internal browser extensions or ran a synthetic benchmark on startup to estimate the device tier. Both approaches are wasteful: the benchmark burns CPU before the call even begins, and extensions don't generalize across browsers. A coarse tier read straight from the platform is one call, costs nothing, and ships everywhere.

see also