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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."
It can't run on XP either, nor phones, nor tablets. Fringe browser for the platform of yesteryear.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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 :)
If any program makes your GPU drivers crash, then take it up with the GPU manufacturer. If the drivers are crashing, then they're defective.
wow, GPL acceleration!
Of course! If its free software it must run faster! ;)
How fast is Apache, then?
(very funny typo ;)
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.
But thanks to GPU accelleration, IE9 fails the Acid3 test much faster.
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If IE8 is any indication, Firefox comes a damn sight closer to passing.
Not perfectly in compliance, granted, but really rather close when compared to what it looked like in IE for me.
Firefox does 97, IE9 does 95 on Acid3.
Which, incidentally, rounds to 12/100. ;P
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
Acid3 isn't a particularly useful test for real world performance and the folks doing the coding and development were right to push it down the list. It uses deliberately broken code to see how the browser handles it. Handling broken code is a bad idea, just make sure it fails without causing a vulnerability and let the web dev fix it. Most decent web devs would rather have a consistent properly functioning target than a browser that handles other browsers broken code.
Ignorance at it's finest. Acid3 is not a standard, it doesn't measure standard compliance. Implementing just enough to pass Opera/Webkit style is absurd, go bark up their tree.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
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.
Acid3 doesn't measure standard compliance. The only thing that you that has a 4/100 chance to break is if you are developing an Acid3 test.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I haven't seen a website require IE in years.
What, 97% ACID3 compliance ain't good enough for you?
100% ACID3 compliance doesn't mean it's fully standards compliant. Chrome is 100% compliant but one check at quirksmode.org and you'll see that it doesn't support some CSS 3 features properly, like 'content', while Firefox supports those same features properly.
Seeing that Chrome still doesn't support basic features like saving tab state after a restart - features that Firefox has had for a long time - I'd say the Firefox team is doing a hell good of a job. Your "needs to swallow its pride" statement is uncalled for.
Wow! MS has really outdone themselves this time... IE9 doesn't go public beta until the 15th and they've already gotten 60% market share? I'm amazed...
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.
"Chrome still doesn't support basic features like saving tab state after a restart"
Factually incorrect.
Only bad operating systems, bad driver programmers and alcohol can make your drivers crash.
If your Kernel panics, it's probably General Protection's fault. But the General will most likely blame it all on a crash caused by Major Device's driver, Private Page.
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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
pay you to build an app for my API, which is documented to 96% accuracy?
Please, please, give me a contract where the documentation is 96% accurate. That would be a dream. The typical state for most contracts is some wishy washy thoughts about what would be nice that then turn out to have been a hallucination one of the managers had the previous night after too much LSD.
IE9 cheats on popular benchmarks (scroll to the bottom). And they still come second-to-last.
Fringe? It's still 60% of the browser usage:
http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0
Re-read OP's post. They are discussing IE9, which does not run on those things (unlike various other versions of IE). So... the 60% marketshare stat you provide is irrelevant to their premise.
In addition, read MSDN's post. It says...
(translated)"HEY!!!! We're FINALLY first with SOMETHING!!!! Let's rub it in everyone else's faces!!!!!!! Maybe they wont notice the fact that once again we wont be compliant with web standards!!!"
(in MS Marketing Speak) "We’re excited that other browsers have started to use hardware to accelerate graphics performance. With different implementations starting to become available, now’s a good time to blog about the difference between full and partial hardware acceleration."
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
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.
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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.
> 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.
Seeing that Chrome still doesn't support basic features like saving tab state after a restart
How is that different from:
Options->Basics->On Startup: Reopen the pages that were open last
Or are you making these claims without having actually used Chrome?
People should get over Acid3.
Some of the features Acid3 tests for are already obsolete (SVG fonts superseded by WOFF) while other crucial features are still buggy.