IE9 Flaunts Hardware-Accelerated Canvas

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.'"

Comments

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[VGPowerlord]

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.

Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this

[Rockoon]

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.