Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

IE9 Team Says "Our GPU Acceleration Is Better Than Yours"

Posted by timothy on from the them's-renderin'-words dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Over on the IE blog Microsoft's Ted Johnson writes, 'With IE9, developers have a fully-hardware accelerated display pipeline that runs from their markup to the screen. Based on their blog posts, the hardware-accelerated implementations of other browsers generally accelerate one phase or the other, but not yet both. Delivering full hardware acceleration, on by default, is an architectural undertaking. When there is a desire to run across multiple platforms, developers introduce abstraction layers and inevitably make tradeoffs which ultimately impact performance and reduce the ability of a browser to achieve 'native' performance. Getting the full value of the GPU is extremely challenging and writing to intermediate layers and libraries instead of an operating system's native support makes it even harder. Windows' DirectX long legacy of powering of the most intensive 3D games has made DirectX the highest performance GPU-based rendering system available.' Some Mozillians hit back in the comments to the IE Blog post and others have written blog posts of their own. PC Mag's Michael Muchmore seems to conclude that IE9 and Firefox 4 are more or less the same (despite the title of his article) while Chrome currently lags behind."

1 of 360 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Pointless battles by Your.Master · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    No.

    Look, I don't actually have a big stake in this particular bug. It's annoying, and it explains an annoyance I have with Firefox, but it's not a huge deal to me; and I understand that when engineering a product, there are tradeoffs. But your attitude is a fucking prize.

    If this bug is important to people, then the solution is to use any of the other browsers, which don't have this problem. It isn't "use my goddamn product and fix it yourself or pay for somebody to fix it, you whiny fuck". Ceteris paribus, I'll also choose the car tires that don't explode unless you patch them up, the TV that doesn't have burn-in problems unless you perform some ritual for the first 50 hours of use*, the digital format that works with my devices without transcoding, and the new car that does not immediately need to be taken to the repairman.

    *I'm aware that plasma screens are better now and they have some other advantages to competing technologies; that's why I specify "ceteris paribus".