IE9 to be GPU-accelerated | Hacker News Reader

IE9 to be GPU-accelerated

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12 pointsthomas20 comments

I guess they missed the fact (in their claim to be the first to have GPU-accelerated graphics) that Safari (and any modern Mac application) has been GPU-accelerated since about 10 years ago (moving more and more into the GPU with Core Graphics over that time).

Also, Firefox (and other Gecko-based browsers) have had GPU-accelerated SVG rendering since 2006.

even some phone (called iPhone iirc) has hw accelerated CSS transforms and animation…

No they don't. Core Graphics still works mainly on the CPU. Only compositing is GPU-accelerated by default. (CG actually has an option to put window backing stores in video memory, called QuartzGL, but even though it's been there since 10.4 it's still not the default - pretty much only Preview uses it.)

Note that compositing is involved in nearly every graphical operation, which means that nearly everything benefits from the GPU acceleration.

I have been experimenting with GPU accelerating computations from Javascript using WebGL. It is pretty bleeding edge but I've succeeded in speeding up matrix multiply. Here is a link for anyone interested: http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?p=1828

I'm happy to read the flight simulator easter egg will finally be playable.

I don't understand why they need hardware acceleration just to reach almost-par with the existing browsers.

Also, no UI work whatsoever in tech preview. One would hope they realize their competition is lightyears ahead of them UI wise.

UI polishing is generally one of the last things you slap on before shipping. That is, unless the release is all about UI.

Will it work with Remote Desktop (Microsoft Windows one)? It will with VNC, and stuff based around VNC, but VNC captures the whole screen, while RDC relies somehow on the driver and it's more optimal.

The problem with RDC is that it fully replaces the graphics driver, making any GPU accelerated stuff to disappear.

Also how it would work with people which machines have been locked after 15 minutes?

A bit of a tangent, but what exactly is the problem with GPU acceleration and screens coming back from power-save mode? I'm having a problem with a GL context not drawing correctly after my monitor wakes up (Windows). I'm not quite sure how to google the problem without getting a bunch of hardware results.

Honest question: Is rendering really a bottleneck in a browser? It seems to me that the overhead of one or two HTTP handshakes would surely out-weigh any performance benefit in the rendering code?

For old school browsing, maybe not. But modern DHTML doesn't necessarily have network activity before every render.

The only difference between this and, say, O3D:

a) it's not a browser plugin b) it's ambiguous whether or not it will be compatible with the working WebGL spec (I'm guessing not)

These aren't the same category. O3D/WebGL uses the GPU to draw 3D graphics; IE9/Firefox uses the GPU to draw regular 2D Web pages.

http://www.betanews.com/article/Will-Firefox-beat-IE9-to-Dir...

I'm had no idea what IExplorer 9 is about ... and what's interesting to me is that they are adding HTML 5 support.

And they are supporting SVG too?

Yes, IE9 will support SVG. Check out demos such as http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/35SVG--oids/Defau...

> I'm had no idea what IExplorer 9 is about

It's all about buzzword compliance and preventing IE from being so broken Windows users would migrate away from it while keeping it broken enough as to prevent as many people as possible from moving to web-only applications.

Let the hyping of semi-vaporware commence!

Haven't we learned anything at all from the W95 -> Chicago -> Memphis -> Cairo -> Windows 2000 -> Windows XP -> Longhorn -> Vista -> Windows 7 replacement hype cycles? Oh, sure: That'll be fixed in X, for sufficiently far away versions of X.

NT was the "first OS with a merged file system and heap cache" or some such, when Solaris and others had the same thing for years. Even the hype terms get appropriated from elsewhere.

I see Microsoft is piling up every buzzword available on top of IE9.

After you watch them for a couple decades, they become amazingly predictable.

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