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

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

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 12, 2010 @08:20AM 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."

13 of 360 comments (clear)

Re:So? by symbolset · 2010-09-12 08:23 · Score: 5, Funny

It can't run on XP either, nor phones, nor tablets. Fringe browser for the platform of yesteryear.

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What good is... by Darkness404 · 2010-09-12 08:24 · Score: 5, Insightful

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?

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1. Re:What good is... by dnaumov · 2010-09-12 08:34 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  "Cross-platform" means its usable on both Windows 7 and Windows Vista.
2. Re:What good is... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-09-12 10:16 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Yeah, nobody ever browses the web on anything other than Microsoft Windows.
  There is no such thing as an iPhone. Where did you get the idea that "iPhones" existed? There is no such thing. There is only Microsoft Windows.
  And "Android" means someone like that robot guy in Star Trek. It is not the name of a popular operating system that millions of people use to read websites. It is just a kind of robot.
  Also: nobody in the entire world owns a Mac, unless you are talking about Big Macs, in which case many people own them but only very briefly. And I am definitely not typing this comment on a Linux box, because Linux is not ready for the desktop, so it is quite impossible that I might be using anything other than Microsoft Windows, which is the only relevant platform in the world.
  Mmm, this kool-aid is tasty. Must drink more.
The best part about in-browser GPU acceleration... by Lost+Found · 2010-09-12 08:28 · Score: 5, Interesting

...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 :)
Pointless battles by mariushm · 2010-09-12 08:48 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
1. Re:Pointless battles by bertok · 2010-09-12 13:17 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  You think that's bad? There was a critical bug in there for years that would completely overwrite your profile with a blank one, including your history, and bookmarks. Back when email was still integrated into the Mozilla browsers, your emails would get wiped too! The bug was caused by writing out the configuration files one line at a time, so that if the browser crashed during a configuration update, you'd be left with a partial configuration file. On the next startup, the browser would detect the error, and cheerfully overwrite your entire profile with the default profile to 'fix' it. The file contents were overwritten in-place, making disaster recovery practically impossible for most users. I won't even mention the performance hit of writing a 100KB file with 10,000 individual IO operations every time Firefox is closed, because compared to the data loss that's insignificant.
  The Bugzilla forum had about 4 dupes of the bug, each with over a thousand panicked posts by users. Some of the reports when back years.
  When it happened to me, it took me about an hour with Sysinternal's Filemon tools to figure out what was going on. The fix is trivial: simply write the new config file out-of-place, and then replace the original with it once it has been fully written. This is programming 101, standard practice for most Linux/Unix apps. Even Microsoft Office apps do this!
  The bug went unfixed for at least 3 years after I first noticed it, despite at least a dozen posts by professional programmers who had even highlighted the source files and line numbers where the change needs to be made.
  Bugzilla seems to be totally ignored by the Firefox programmers. I suspect that just like many open source programmers, they only care about the "shiny new stuff". Mundane work like fixing bugs is boring, so nobody does it unless forced to.
Re:So? by mwvdlee · 2010-09-12 08:55 · Score: 5, Funny

But thanks to GPU accelleration, IE9 fails the Acid3 test much faster.

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Re:So? by dotwhynot · 2010-09-12 09:08 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Re:So? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-09-12 09:39 · Score: 5, Funny

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...
Re:So? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-09-12 09:58 · Score: 5, Informative

"Chrome still doesn't support basic features like saving tab state after a restart"
Factually incorrect.
Re:Oh God by Archangel+Michael · 2010-09-12 15:36 · Score: 5, Funny

while rats ate their organs, with a blaring Phil Collins soundtrack.
Careful now, you might get PETA involved with you torturing the poor rats with Phil Collins "music'

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Re:Who cares if most people use IE9 by BZ · 2010-09-12 15:56 · Score: 5, Informative

> 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.