|
Microsoft's IE 9 to get GPU acceleration |
|
|
|
Written by Nick Farrell
|
|
Monday, 23 November 2009 09:41 |
Delegates tasks away from the browser
The next version of Internet Explorer will gain speed by off-loading as much as it can way from the browser and onto the machine. IE9 will speed up the browser's overall performance by sending image and text rendering chores to the PC's graphic processor.
The idea to use a computer's graphics processor unit (GPU) to accelerate their browsers is also being looked at by Mozilla, which makes Firefox, and Norwegian developer Opera. Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft's president of Windows and Windows Live, said that early work on IE9 had already shown significant performance strides.
IE9 will ditch Windows' GDI (Graphics Device Interface) used by earlier versions for image rendering, and instead call on the Direct2D and DirectWrite APIs (application programming interfaces) to render two-dimensional images and text. It means that graphics hardware acceleration can render graphically
intensive sites faster while using less CPU.
Early results have meant that IE can render at 40, 50 or 60 frames per second. At the moment it can just render about six.
|
Graphics 