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IE9 Team Says "Our GPU Acceleration Is Better Than Yours"
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."
IE 9 still can't pass Acid3.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
What good is having GPU acceleration that only works on one platform? The -entire- point of the trend of doing things in-browser is to make cross-platform compatibility a reality. If I wanted a game to work just on Windows, why wouldn't I just make an application that did that?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
...is that thanks to the lack of an IOMMU on consumer x86 computers, JavaScript exploits in the browser can now give you access to all the computer's memory, and along with it, ring 0. I can't wait to see the first whitepaper on the subject :)
So now IE 9 can make my GPU drivers crash. Instead of simply locking up and making me kill the process.
Free software web browser projects should reply by saying that they have better privacy, give away less personal / identifying information, help users avoid being mislead into clicking on ads, etc. etc.
I've never noticed whether my browser has fast, or slow, or any GPL acceleration.
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I find it ridiculous how browsers battle over something like this when they can't fix very old and stupid bugs, and fully support some older standards such as CSS 1 and CSS 2.
For example, Firefox crashes when a user loads a 2-3 MB GIF file, because each frame is kept decoded in memory and the browser goes over the 2 GB memory barrier (for 32 bit applications). https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=523950
Or, another example, the file input box ignores any css color rules simply because the html specs doesn't specify any rule so for several years nobody is able to decide something. It's actually since 2000 ffs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52500
Or, for several years now, when uploading a file using a form, the progress is stuck somewhere around 50% and it's discussed over and over but nobody can actually do even a temporary simple fix. Since 2004: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249338
It's actually surprising they're able to code something as complex as gpu acceleration when they can't fix small bugs and at the same time it's unfortunate that basic things are forever and ever skipped in the hunt to get the latest "features" (sometimes just to check something on a feature list) instead of actually getting some things working properly.
That's misleading. IE9 gets something like 96/100 in the Acid3 test.
That's absolutely OK for most practical purposes.
I don't care if Albert Einstein rises from the dead and announces on Colbert that he has proven that Internet Explorer's display technology is fastest that the laws of physics allow.
I still will not use any browser controlled by Microsoft.
The GPU, as it's normally on PCIe these days, has DMA capabilities. On most (all?) x86 systems DMA isn't restricted through an MMU, unlike CPU memory access. This means that by sending the correct commands to the GPU you can access any part of the system memory.
If this is possible in reality I have no idea, but that's the concept.
--sitharus
AMD x86_64 processors have an IOMMU. Intel's first x86_64 processors didn't but I don't know if this is still the case. IOMMUs are also important if you are running virtual machine software that allows some VMs access to physical hardware -- Xen lets you do this, for instance.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
I haven't seen a website require IE in years.
I've never gone to a website and cared about how fast it rendered. What I do care about is how secure I am and if the browser is able to deal all the pop ups, pop unders and other junk.
The IE dev team are just lacking any other decent USP to sell the merits of IE over other browsers. Firefox hasn't really made all that many big improvements for some time. So there's not much for IE to copy.
You're looking for This one. W7 and Vista have together less than 30%, and that's the only operating systems IE9 will run on. So if they get 100% of those, which seems unlikely, their max upside today is 30% of the total browser market. Since as you note they only get 60% share even though Windows is over 90%, it's a 20% upside potential for IE9 today - probably less since early adopters are also the people most likely to choose a different browser. Fringe. Not enough to dominate the developers.
XP has a very long tail. It's still selling in the market and will be installed through downgrade rights for the entire life of W7. XP will likely still be over 50% three years from now. IE9 doesn't run on XP.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Your post proves you have no idea about web development. Try and get an even moderately complex site to display the same in ie 6, 7 & 8; even ignoring all the other browsers you'll be sinking at least an extra 20% time/effort. Yet I can make something that works in firefox 1.x and it'll work exactly the same in chrome 7
AMD x86_64 processors have an IOMMU. Intel's first x86_64 processors didn't but I don't know if this is still the case. IOMMUs are also important if you are running virtual machine software that allows some VMs access to physical hardware -- Xen lets you do this, for instance.
...and it might actually matter when you can actually find a motherboard with a chipset that also supports the IOMMU on the CPU. At the moment, that means an X58 chipset (socket 1366) for Intel, and for AMD, you're pretty much out of luck.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
IE9 cheats on popular benchmarks (scroll to the bottom). And they still come second-to-last.
Flame away, but one area where MS is currently destroying the competition is on GPU acceleration. Mac is playing catch up, and unfortunately Linux is still a mess. There is a reason game companies still get away with releasing for Windows and ignoring Mac and Linux.
When viewing scaled video, it's a huge factor. And when using web applications (as opposed to reading the news) it's a significant factor. Oh, and when scrolling, not like anyone ever does that with webpages.
And we're not talking tenths of a millisecond here. If each scroll operation takes you 200ms (easy to run into without hardware acceleration on some sites out there that are sticking video or large translucent images over fixed-position backgrounds), you just lose.
I wish I could introduce you to the hell that is HP's partner portal, their Learning Center, the portal for support. It's a carnival of the obscene. As someone who understands web design I have to hope there's a special level of hell devoted to eternally tormenting these web developers.
Not only do these sites require specific versions of IE, but then you come to a certain point where they don't even work with those, so you have to migrate the session to other browsers through trial and error until you find the one that works with it. It's sick. It's like an online skill test that requires four nines of web proficiency in order to download a freaking driver update or read the product alerts.
In a perfect world some auditor would have these web developers separated from their skin slowly, under a saltwater and lemon juice shower while rats ate their organs, with a blaring Phil Collins soundtrack.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
See here for a handful of AMD boards which do support the IOMMU present in the 890FX chipset. In addition, the ASUS M4A89TD Pro/USB3 supports ECC as well, which is nice. Sadly, outside of the server chipsets, the others in the 800 series do not support the IOMMU.
The real war 5 years was against ActiveX and IE6.
The war now is, generally speaking against Flex, Silverlight, and some of the things Apple seems to want to do with Webkit that are much like IE back in the IE4/5 days.
That is, now that we don't have a monopoly we'd really like it to _stay_ that way.
> I don't see Flash going anywhere for at least a decade
No one cares that Flash exists. What's important is that it be possible to develop tomorrow's web sites without having to use Flash, and that it be possible to browse the web at least somewhat reasonably without having Flash (e.g. not all sites need to work, but there should be sites in a given category that work without Flash). That's a somewhat realistic goal right now; for example very few banks require Flash (though some do).
> Silverlight won't have the install base of HTML5
The goal is to keep it that way, yes.
> Apple doesn't have enough influence to change the direction of the web.
You apparently haven't had to deal with the "if it's on a cell phone it must be Webkit" mindset of developers of "mobile" sites. See the part dealing with -webkit-text-size-adjust at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/iemobile/archive/2010/05/10/javascript-and-css-changes-in-ie-mobile-for-windows-phone-7.aspx which Microsoft was forced to take out later. Note that there have been calls for Gecko to similarly add support on mobile for some of the -webkit-* stuff Apple has been pushing people to use. Those calls have been resisted so far, but as for the future.... who knows.