IE9 to get GPU acceleration

mrk · 23 Nov 2009 at 10:26

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.

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?!

mrk · 24 Nov 2009 at 02:36

10yrs overdue?

Lol, Broadband wasn't efficient enough then let alone gfx cards for GPGPU tasking.

mrk · 25 Nov 2009 at 12:09

Looks like Firefox team has been on the Direct2D talks for a while now

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10403604-264.html?tag=digg

But the day of Microsoft's demo, Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard had this to tweet: "Interesting that we're doing Direct2D support in Firefox as well--I'll bet we'll ship it first."

Good times

mrk · 25 Nov 2009 at 12:23

Not really, nothing changes server side, it's all how the browser renders the page.

mrk · 25 Nov 2009 at 12:33

Hmm I see, from a business POV maybe that would be an issue because office pcs rarely have a decent GPU good enough for Aero let alone Direct2D.

But there is a but.

Direct2D is only usable on Vista or Win7 and not XP so assuming a business upgrades to Win7 then their systems will be compatible anyway.