IE9 Throws Down the Hardware Acceleration Gauntlet

An anonymous reader writes "Over on Microsoft's IE blog they have an interesting comparison of browsers with regard to hardware accelerated page rendering. They write, 'One of our objectives with Internet Explorer 9 is taking full advantage of modern PC hardware to make the browser faster. We're excited about hardware acceleration because it fundamentally improves the performance of websites. The websites that you use every day become faster and more responsive, and developers can create new classes of web applications through standards based markup that were previously not possible. In this post, we take a closer look at how hardware acceleration improves the performance of the Flying Images sample on the IE9 test drive site. When you run Flying Images across different browsers you'll see that Internet Explorer 9 can handle hundreds of images at full speed while other browsers, including Internet Explorer 8, quickly come to a crawl.' Absent from the comparison is a nightly build of Firefox with Mozilla's forthcoming Direct2D acceleration enabled."

Comments

Re:Why bother ...

[stickytar]

But will it run Crysis? No mod points, but parent is right. Technology like this will move real games into the browser. I won't be long before the DirectX toolset it setup to render in HTML5. If Microsoft can grab this then their little netbooks with shared GPU could actually push out some decent gaming and graphic capabilities to you live in a browser (without the need for hard drives).

Re:Shouldn't the OS handle this?

[SWPadnos]

It's just the definition of an operating system, that's all.

The OS is there to provide a standardized (for that OS - not necessarily across OSes) interface to hardware resources. This includes memory, disk space, CPU time, and of course user interface hardware.

If there were no OSes, everyone would have to include e.g. filesystem software within any program that wanted to use the disk drive. The whole point of Windows was to insulate the programmer from the hardware - you use the same GDI calls whether you have a Diamond, 3dFX, Number Nine, or Matrox card (back in the old days). The driver and OS insulate the application from the specifics of talking to the hardware.

Video games are a bit of a special case, because they are the most performance-limited applications most people see. For most applications, there should be no need to know anything about the hardware implementation - only its capabilities (resolution, color depth, etc). The OS API should insulate the programmer from having to know the details of the underlying hardware. For specific applications though, where the highest performance is needed, the application needs to just reserve the hardware resources and ask the OS to get out of the way. Databases need this for memory and disk management, and video games need this for graphics hardware. There shouldn't be a need for a browser to get to this level.

Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft!

[FlyingBishop]

Yes, but that power has just been offloaded to the GPU. From that graph it looks like the actual power savings were minor, if there were any at all.

Re:I feel sad.

[theaveng]

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