IE9 to get GPU acceleration

mrk

mrk

mrk

Man of Honour
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
104,361
Location
South Coast
Reported by Fud:

Delegates tasks away from the browser

The next version of Internet Explorer will gain speed by off-loading as much as it can way from the browser and onto the machine. IE9 will speed up the browser's overall performance by sending image and text rendering chores to the PC's graphic processor.

The idea to use a computer's graphics processor unit (GPU) to accelerate their browsers is also being looked at by Mozilla, which makes Firefox, and Norwegian developer Opera. Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft's president of Windows and Windows Live, said that early work on IE9 had already shown significant performance strides.

IE9 will ditch Windows' GDI (Graphics Device Interface) used by earlier versions for image rendering, and instead call on the Direct2D and DirectWrite APIs (application programming interfaces) to render two-dimensional images and text. It means that graphics hardware acceleration can render graphically
intensive sites faster while using less CPU.

Early results have meant that IE can render at 40, 50 or 60 frames per second. At the moment it can just render about six.
Click to expand...

How do you analyse how fast a 2d page is rendering when there's no motion? Does this mean the return of page transition effects?!
 
Sounds interesting!

I am always glad to hear about software making use of all the hardware in your computer. Makes perfect sense to have that £300 graphics card pull its weight when you're not fragging noobs.
 
asim18 said:
Dont know if it's the same thing, but google has this:
http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/

The samples work great.
Pretty cool what you can render in the browser.
Click to expand...

That's nowhere near the same thing.

Microsoft is pushing all the HTML and CSS rendering through a DirectX pipeline. This is going to raise the bar for what defines a "fast web browser". IE9 will be the highest performing upon release. But it is also going to open the web browser to new exciting ways of designing web sites that would have been too slow in the past - including, perhaps, the HTML5 <canvas> tag.

What Google have done there is some proprietary 3D engine and presumably markup language.

MS are also optimising their Javascript engine to bring it inline with Chrome's V8 engine.
 
With this and flash player on GPU, it could make for a less laggy browsing experience on lots of lower end machines. Even mid range actually sometimes lag on pages.
 
alexhull24 said:
With this and flash player on GPU, it could make for a less laggy browsing experience on lots of lower end machines. Even mid range actually sometimes lag on pages.
Click to expand...

Indeed. No longer will crappy Flash video players attempt to render HD video using the GDI pipeline...
lol.gif
Well actually they still will but IE9 will automagically wrap the GDI calls into Direct2D calls ;)
 
It hardly utilises the cpu though?

Also, can someone please give a website where the internet connection isn't the bottleneck and where gpu acceleration will help.
 
NathanE said:
That's nowhere near the same thing.

Microsoft is pushing all the HTML and CSS rendering through a DirectX pipeline. This is going to raise the bar for what defines a "fast web browser". IE9 will be the highest performing upon release. But it is also going to open the web browser to new exciting ways of designing web sites that would have been too slow in the past - including, perhaps, the HTML5 <canvas> tag.

What Google have done there is some proprietary 3D engine and presumably markup language.

MS are also optimising their Javascript engine to bring it inline with Chrome's V8 engine.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't go that far, the release will likely be 2011 or 2012, by that time all the other browsers would have developed even further ahead than IE.

And O3D is a completely open source Javascript API.
 
This sort of thing is maybe about 10 years overdue - they should have looked to utilise the gfx card as soon as possible for browsing.
 
10yrs overdue?

Lol, Broadband wasn't efficient enough then let alone gfx cards for GPGPU tasking.
 
Good idea and probably about time.

GPUs in non game mode, i.e. when you're just listening to music or browsing the web were always underused (and often purposely underclocked). I don't mind using it a bit more. IE7 on a 3GHz dual core (ok not the fastest thing around but) is still very laggy even doing something simple like opening a new tab.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom