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IE9 Flaunts Hardware-Accelerated Canvas

Posted by timothy on from the flaunting-not-flouting dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Over on the IE blog they have a rundown of IE9's hardware accelerated support for the canvas element. They write, 'With the recent release of the latest IE9 platform preview, we talked about how we're rebuilding the browser to use the power of your whole PC to browse the web, and to unlock a new class of HTML5 applications. One area that developers are especially excited about is the potential of HTML5 canvas. Like all of the graphics in IE9, canvas is hardware accelerated through Windows and the GPU. In this blog post we discuss some of the details behind canvas and the kinds of things developers can build.'"

5 of 265 comments (clear)

  1. Re:what about the video tag? by VGPowerlord · · Score: 3, Informative

    Er... I'm pretty sure that MS said they would support the video tag back when IE9 was announced. A few months back, they said which format it would support (H.264), although just a week or two ago MS said they would also support WebM if the codec was installed.

    --
    GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
  2. Re:just the canvas? by phizi0n · · Score: 3, Informative

    The whole browser is hardware accelerated by the new Direct2D and Directwrite API's. It's just that the biggest noticeable advantage is the speedup of the canvas element which is used to manipulate a lot of graphics. Firefox nightly alphas had it working before the first IE9 preview was released and it will be in FF 4.0. Firefox devs are also working on OpenGL acceleration for other platforms but that's much further away.

  3. Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this by VGPowerlord · · Score: 4, Informative

    I tried these canvas-based apps on Windows 7 in various browsers.

    The ones I tried work in Firefox 3.6.6, Opera 10.60, and Chrome 5.0.375.99.

    On Firefox 3.6.6, they're all horrifically slow.

    Opera 10.60 worked a little better than Firefox did, but not by much.

    Chrome 5.0.375.99 worked about the same as Opera 10.60 did.

    Note: My nVidia drivers are from back in November last year, due to a bug in newer nVidia drivers with the game Shattered Horizons. Not sure if that would affect rendering speeds or not.

    --
    GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
  4. Re:A house built on sand cannot stand. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Your list of bugs would be extremely valuable to the IE team. I suggest sending it along, or at least seeing if they're addressed with the IE9 platform preview build.

  5. Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this by Rockoon · · Score: 4, Informative

    GDI was designed to work with any sort of plotting device, such as printers. The shortcomings of GDI were the reason that the HAL's for windows display devices were designed, the first of which was WinG, and while later incarnations of GDI gave greater performance and some hardware acceleration support, there are now many hardware features that simply cannot be incorporated into GDI.

    Things like texture mapping, gradients, alpha blending, etc.. are just not efficient with GDI, and supporting them would only be for a single kind of plotting device (video cards) so it just doesnt make sense to roll those things up into GDI when there are HAL's specifically tailored for those purposes.

    --
    "His name was James Damore."