Recently, a lot of work is being done to introduce GPU rendering into Google Chrome. New additions into web technologies like WebGL and 3D CSS has brought up a need for the web browser to be more CPU intensive. Most definitely, this is undesirable and Google Chrome is taking the right step in offloading the responsibility of rendering these components to the GPU. This will considerably improve the performance and responsiveness of Google Chrome.

Google Chrome will feature a new GPU process in future versions that will manage all graphics related responsibilities. The GPU process will take in all graphics rendering tasks from the renderer process and send it to OpenGL or Direct3D. This access was not available to the renderer process earlier and neither is it now. However, the GPU process in question is allowed to run in a sandbox and have access to these graphics components of the OS.

This feature will be available for color conversion and scaling of videos. This will lighten the overburdened renderer process and give Google Chrome a smooth performance.

The idea of GPU rendering has just been implemented and the Chromium team wants to develop and advance more in this matter.

(Source)