Chrome will use gpu to render pages

http://blog.chromium.org/2010/08/chromium-graphics-overhaul.html

by catalinist • 16 years ago

91 47 16 years ago

blog.chromium.org

walkon3• 16 years ago

Not trying to detract from Chrome here, but IE9 should have a similar ability:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/04/09/Benefits-of-GPU-...

patrickaljord5• 16 years ago

The reason it took longer for chrome is that they are trying to sandbox everything, including what goes through the GPU which according to the chrome devs is very difficult and painful. They could have gotten the whole thing to render on the GPU a long time ago if it wasn't for the sandboxing.

junkbit2• 16 years ago

Not to mention doing it on all 3 platforms as well as translating OpenGL to Direct3D on the fly using ANGLE.

snprbob86• 16 years ago

"took longer"? They are likely to beat IE9 to official release.

cninja• 16 years ago

Not trying to detract from IE9 here, but Opera already has a similar ability:

http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2009/02/04/vega

The interesting parts of the article are the implementation details about the sandbox.

walkon3• 16 years ago

The thing about Opera is, it only has around 2.5% of the market. IE9 will probably have over 30% of the browser market within two years, which is a major factor when thinking about any web development, especially with HTML5 features like canvas.

modeless2• 16 years ago

Opera's hardware acceleration is vaporware. It has not been included in any release of Opera, despite that article being over a year old now.

jf• 16 years ago

Has. A preview is available for download now: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/

nailer• 16 years ago

Looking forward to this - I frequently scale web pages (my vision isn't great) and it bugs me this common activity still isn't smooth in 2010.

modeless2• 16 years ago

Have you tried an iPad? For some reason Mobile Safari is still far better at scaling pages than desktop Safari.

InclinedPlane3• 16 years ago

As exciting as it is for IE9 to enter the next-gen browser wars in earnest I wonder if they are already too late.

IE releases are still tied to the years long windows ship cycle, which is a significant disadvantage when all your competitors are on months long cycles. Saddled with such a huge OODA disadvantage as well as all the strategy-tax BS from MS is there any hope?

By the time IE9 is actually out Chrome may well have hardware accelerated everything, an LLVM client/plugin model, javascript that runs faster than Java, and client-side Erlang support (or who knows what), with Firefox not far behind. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.

walkon3• 16 years ago

It does seem too late for them to pull off something like they did with IE6 versus Netscape, but I could see their genuine efforts with IE9 keeping them from getting thrown to the wolves by average users. Many people still using IE regularly probably don't care (or even know) what browser they are using, so if the websites they visit work, they'll probably never think of changing and just take whatever MS puts out. I think IE9 could come in time to at least maintain their total browser share of around 50% over the next five or so years.

mike-cardwell• 16 years ago

Most people have no idea what a browser is. As long as MS ship IE as the default browser without choice, they will have a massive competitive advantage and keep the majority of users.

In European versions of Windows, you now get a choice between which web browser to use. That's about as fair as it's going to get.

wmf• 16 years ago

IE releases are still tied to the years long windows ship cycle

Are you saying that IE 9 won't ship until Windows 8 ships? Because what I'v read shows IE 9 shipping in 2011 and Windows 8 in 2012.

invisible• 16 years ago

If we're going to jump into that line of thought: Vista shipped 3 years late and with half of the "cool" features stripped out. I think the IE 9 team has something to prove now, and it's obvious Microsoft is making a push in making IE not suck.

melling2• 16 years ago

IE still has 60% market share, and it's holding steady. IE9 is going to be one of the most important products Microsoft ever ships. It will be compatible enough with web standards, and offer enough performance, that it should allow developers to build more sophisticated apps based on open standards. Html5, css3 and fast Javascript will soon be a given.

InclinedPlane3• 16 years ago

IE had 95%. Things change, sometimes things change quickly. Everyone who is capable of using facebook is capable of installing chrome or firefox. If IE truly fell behind, if a new killer web-app/site comes along that didn't work in IE the marketshare numbers would change overnight.

fjarlq• 16 years ago

Holding steady? How do you figure that, exactly?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#His...

jacquesm• 16 years ago

> IE still has 60% market share, and it's holding steady.

You mean: "has been dropping steadily".

> IE9 is going to be one of the most important products Microsoft ever ships.

I've heard that about '95, '98, 2000, XP, Vista and windows 7 as well as a whole bunch of products. They can't all be 'one of the most important products Microsoft ever ships'.

> It will be compatible enough with web standards, and offer enough performance, that it should allow developers to build more sophisticated apps based on open standards. Html5, css3 and fast Javascript will soon be a given.

They already are, just not in the IE world. That's the reason for line one above, Microsoft has been playing catch-up.

jamesbritt3• 16 years ago

"IE releases are still tied to the years long windows ship cycle, ..."

I'm pretty sure I get notifications for Windows Updates when there's a new version of IE. And even if not, I've somehow gotten IE 7 or 8 on an XP install, so it's no different than when Mozilla or Google announce a new release. If you want it, you get it.

andreyf2• 16 years ago

If you want it, you get it.

The people who want it are irrelevant. So are the people who don't want it. Both are minorities compared to the people who don't care, and just pick the default option. Chrome's default is to silently upgrade, and light a tiny orange dot when you need to restart.

protomyth5• 16 years ago

IE9 is a lot friendlier to a system admin trying to install on hundreds of computers. The default Chrome download doesn't even install system wide. It would help if Google has a simple MSI package that did a systemwide install and allowed for updates from a local server, not calling Google all the time.

tuxychandru2• 16 years ago

The automatic and frequent update system is one thing which makes Chrome very good. It can pretty much be assumed that all users connected to the internet would be atleast on the latest stable version.

jjcm• 16 years ago

Good - Opera, Firefox, and IE9 are all aready going this route. For Chromium not to support this would be a big thorn in their side, especially with their plans to support native code for extensions (aka, "Chrome Apps").

swah• 16 years ago

I imagine this is related with WebGL support, right?

Legion• 16 years ago

The article says, "New APIs and markup like WebGL and 3D CSS transforms are a major motivation for this work".

That's what makes it exciting. Hardware acceleration for rendering the front page of HN: not so exciting. Hardware acceleration for 3D APIs drawing stuff in a canvas tag: very exciting.

est• 16 years ago

Also Flash 11 is about to support 3D and it looks serious

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20009940-264.html

Unity3D is at a turning point.

mambodog• 16 years ago

Yeah, it is at a turning point, it's about to become plugin-less using Native Client.

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/05/19/google-android-and-the-f...

c00p3r• 16 years ago

I didn't saw libGLcore.so in `ldd chtomium-browser' output. ^_^

ck2• 16 years ago

It would have been helpful to have some kind of benchmark to show performance improvements or cpu load reduction.

I guess this is more important for advanced features like canvas than regular browsing.

junkbit2• 16 years ago

Matt Cutts tweeted a design document about the technical details

https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/desig...

Chrome will use gpu to render pages

Related Stories