Played it for a few minutes and dominated a handful of tanks with the helicopter. I'm usually a huge fan of this style of game but I think they are more fun in 2D than this style of 3D.
The test version is now replaced with a new version which runs a lot smoother...
One of the major problems with the test version was the rotation of the tiles which was done within the perspective matrix. The tiles were also rendered separately. In the new engine those problems are fixed along with the texturing of the ground.
Yeah, Chrome is not fully hardware accelerated yet and I don't think it will be until at least v11. In a recent test by DownloadSquad it seems they are the ones behind the most in this, even behind Opera. I don't know why they missed this opportunity and didn't give it a higher priority. It's the same problem with hardware acceleration on Android all over again.
It's almost like Google and anything graphics related don't mix, even though improving full hardware acceleration performance is probably as important for the further development of the web as improving Javascript performance was. I think this will be where the new battle between browsers will be in 2011 and 2012 at least.
In 11.0.691.0 canary, GPU acceleration of Canvas is still an option in about:flags, just as it is in 9.0.597.107. GPU accelerated compositing is no longer optional, though, it appears. Of course, that's only the canary build, and I expect that the 11.x build that's actually released will be somewhat different, but still.
It's slow for me too (Chrome on Linux) but I thought that was because I don't have hardware acceleration working on my Acer netbook. What hardware/OS are you using?
I wish someone would make a MMO version of the Tank game on Wii Play. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMqEoZivjnU)