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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."
I feel sad about it when hardware acceleration is needed for rendering, what, websites.
We live in interesting times indeed. I want my Web back.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
I'll bet that Chrome and Firefox will have this in production before IE9 is released.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
What about those of us who don't want to see flying-rotating-3d-semitransparent-glowing-shaded adverts flying across our web pages.
I want fast clean loads of information. Not bloated pages full of shiny dodads designed to divert my attention from the information I am looking for.
I'm often left sitting there for microseconds while the page is rendered in software. I'm sure having hardware accelerated rendering of web pages would change my life immeasurably.
BTW Microsoft, if hardware acceleration is so important why is the GDI not hardware accelerated in Vista and only partially accelerated in Windows 7 (about nine functions) even though it was fully accelerated in XP? Can we get some consistency here?
Really shouldn't the Operating System be using hardware rendering for graphics calls?
Yes I know that they are probably using D2D or DirectX to handle this but don't the hardware graphics calls in Windows use hardware acceleration already?
I hope that Xwindows does I know that OpenGL does but over all an application shouldn't have to care about "hardware" at all! That is why we have Operating Systems.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Why do people keep using idioms which don't mean anything in the modern language any more?
By definition, no idiom's meaning is apparent in modern language. Unless you don't know what a gauntlet is, this idiom is no different than any other. They are used because they are colorful and make our language more interesting.
I've never understood this 'my browser is faster than your browser' attention. Most people use their browser over the Internet, with download speeds that make any computer wait.
So you've completely missed the advent of Web applications? Little Web based games, chat, e-mail, social networking, word processing, image editing, and hundreds of other incredibly popular Web technologies are currently limited by the rendering speed as often as by bandwidth. People will wait for a Web app to load, but that doesn't mean they're okay with waiting for it to respond when they do something in it.
If you just use your computer to edit text, then the same could probably be said about OS's and computer hardware. Why bother improving their graphics capabilities? Of course to do so you have to willfully ignore how they are used by normal people today and the direction they have been developing. They don't develop things just for you.
You could upgrade your connection. That's hardware acceleration right there.
Nerd Rock In Progress
You forgot a functional x86 emulator written in javascript so you can run Linux in Firefox in Linux in Firefox in Linux...
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
The idioms do mean things in modern language, that's why they're used. What you're trying to say is that the actual practice from which the idiom is derived is no longer in use outside of Ren Fairs. That doesn't matter, because meaning is independent of literal reading, which is the whole foundation of idioms in the first place. An idiom is literally some word or phrase that cannot be understood by literal translation. The end. So basically you're asking why do we use idioms at all, as though you want a bland, flavorless, mechanistic language with no depth, no humor, no layers, etc. etc.
In short, you're a dolt.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
not only that, but it's also proprietary, aka directX. So they're paving the way for, well, nothing.
What about those of us who don't want to see flying-rotating-3d-semitransparent-glowing-shaded adverts flying across our web pages. I want fast clean loads of information. Not bloated pages full of shiny dodads designed to divert my attention from the information I am looking for.
The Interwebs are about freedom, and you are free not to view any site you feel is offensive in some way. Interweb freedom is about the freedom to choose. IE9 chooses certain voluntary standards, and not other voluntary standards, and even creates some of its own voluntary standards. All of which you are free not to use because of the freedom to choose a different browser. It's about freedom. Freedom to choose, not freedom to be restricted to RMS' view of how the Interweb should be.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Wow, seriously? I just ran the demo on my iMac and couldn't get above 10 fps.
Maybe you're running Snow Leopard? I'm still on 10.5, which has no OpenCL on board. Could it be that the latest versions of Safari and Firefox use OpenCL to accelerate these sort of things already?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
for their shitty ie8 treats tag as a block level element. which means, you cant format or distribute long, populated forms properly with the use of divs, tables or any other form of structured output tag. adding "display : inline;" to a separate style declaration into the form tag doesnt fix it either. so, if you have any nested structure coexisting with the form, the tag acts like a or a
in regard to that structure in ie8. no other browser has this issue, not even ie6 has this issue.
this is a current hell, that i am in precisely at this second in time, and i have to fix their incompetence for my client.
so my advice to them is ; fix your browser before doing any 'acceleration'.
Read radical news here
Instead of reducing the amount of computation we do in IE to make it faster, let's just look for more processing power instead!
Did you look at the CPU graphs at the end of the article? If you look at the graphs for IE8 and IE9, it shows the CPU usage has been greatly reduced by offloading the tasks to the GPU. It went from 50% CPU usage to an average of 12%.
This is just a better use of the processing power available in the modern computer.
i would like to call the idiot who modded the above flamebait to come and fix the tag block level interpretation issue in ie8. their rendering engine is screwing up, and since it is proprietary, it cant be fixed by community. so we have to wait microsoft to get its ass up and fix their incompetence themselves in some far away point in future.
adding a proprietary directx to the mix will just increase these kind of hellholes, due to adding another dimension to watch out for. and since its proprietary, someone somewhere wont be able to produce a fix and publish it to relieve everyone.
so, the fool that modded the above flamebait, please, come and fix this rendering failure today.
Read radical news here
>reducing the amount of computation we do in IE
Apparently that's not working so hot for the other browsers in this case: "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."
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
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This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
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That is of course if Mozilla does the same thing too.
But really who cares... What people want is a fast browser. IE is now one of the older browsers out there, it has a lot of stuff that cannot be removed, a lot of backwards compatibility that other browsers just don't care about. IE is still used heavily in a lot on intranet based applications and you just can't really do a full clean house. But if IE 9 takes a lot of the overhead and has the hardware do some more of the work and things work faster it is just better for all of us... Still any web application needs to be tested to make sure it works with IE, and this will be the case for a long time. If IE runs too slow it stops us developers from putting new features and options that may take the load off the server, just because IE runs too slow. I remember back in the IE6 I had a search screen that I needed to redo because in Firefox the page loaded in 0.5 seconds (1 second on the iPhone Safari) and IE loaded it in 5 minutes... Taking way too long to process.
So if IE can render faster all the better that means I can balance the work the server and client does, more efficiently.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Slashdot is filled with Tech luddites. Kinda odd.
We should totally support the new hardware rendering in Firefox for this reason. Because... oh shit, they use DirectX too.
Similes are like metaphors
Finally, someone is doing this right. I don't know how many times I've wished for hundreds of flying images obscuring the web page content. I was getting bored of just one or two constantly distracting me every time I scrolled or did anything, since they didn't always make me leave the page in disgust. But hundreds, shit yeah. I feel like the time I got one of those five-blade razors. This is one big step to the day they finally bring the Web up to television standards, so that I can confidently avoid it just like I've avoided TV for the last decade. Here's to progress.
Because of the complexity of pages now. If you want to stay with no-image, no-javascript, no-flash html, there are fantastic browsers out there that will support your every need. But if you want to do crazy things with your browser like: Ball Pool, then it's going to make that poor browser nom your clock cycles like a morbidly obese person at a buffet.
Their flying images demo just kept on rolling when I tried it with firefox 3.6 on my slackware linux box. I jacked the number of images up as high as it would go and it was still doing something like 50fps. So looks like firefox got their first.
all versions of vista, including windows 7, will never be usable on 256MB.
Oh really?
- Win7 on 256 MB - http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=windows+7+on+256+MB
- Win7 on 128 MB - http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=windows+7+on+128MB
I agree it runs like crap on 128, about like using XP on 128MB, but WIN7 works fine on 256. Half the memory is used for the OS, and the other half is available for apps.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
As the owner of a quad core with an Nvidia 8800 I am constantly underwhelmed by applications (3D, Video Editing, power point... basically everything that's not a game) performing absolutely mediocre because they don't take advantage of even basic acceleration capabilities of my sound and graphics hardware. What the hell is the point of having built in mpeg or dolby 5.1 enc/dec if nothing uses it? I might as well still be using my SB16. My video card is supposed to be able to decompress avc natively but my NLE stupidly throws it at the cpu making my 512mb 8800 no more effective than a 16mb Voodoo Banshee. I don't care if it's office, my web browser, or Adobe Premiere. I bought a bangin GPU because I wanted my apps to use it. Microsoft can't clean up the millions of crappy web pages out there by releasing a new browser. They can however make those millions of crappy web pages hog less of the CPU.