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Firefox Getting GPU Acceleration, Maybe Before IE9

By - Source: Tom's Hardware US | B 42 comments

Soon your GPU can flex its muscles while you're surfing too.

Last week, when Microsoft gave its preview of Internet Explorer 9 at Professional Developers Conference, it showed the upcoming browser's GPU-accelerated rendering capabilities.

President of Microsoft's Windows and Windows Live division Steven Sinofsky showed that IE8 can render Bing maps at 14 frames per second. With hardware acceleration in IE9 turned on, he got 60 frames per second -- impressive, indeed.

Microsoft isn't the only one thinking of leveraging GPU involvement for browser performance boosts, however, as Mozilla has been cooking up something similar in its kitchen too.

On the day of Microsoft's IE9 demo, Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard tweeted, "Interesting that we're doing Direct2D support in Firefox as well - I'll bet we'll ship it first. :)"

While neither Microsoft nor Mozilla have committed to any ship date for its hardware-accelerated browsers, Firefox developer Bas Schouten wrote about his work on DirectWrite and Direct2D.

"A while ago I started my investigation into Direct2D usage in firefox (see bug 527707). Since then we've made significant progress and are now able to present a Firefox browser completely rendered using Direct2D, making intensive usage of the GPU (this includes the UI, menu bars, etc.)," he wrote. "I won't be showing any screenshots, since it is not supposed to look much different. But I will be sharing some technical details, first performance indications and a test build for those of you running Windows 7 or an updated version of Vista!"

His opinion on Windows 7 aside, Schouten presented benchmarks comparing Direct2D rendering compared to Windows' Graphics Device Interface (GDI) rendering as tested on an Intel Core i7 920 system with an ATI Radeon HD 4850 GPU.

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Top Comments
  • 19 Hide
    MU_Engineer , November 25, 2009 8:21 PM
    I wonder how many people didn't even see the graph or read the article but just clicked on the "Zoom" button below the girl in the Firefox tank top?
  • 10 Hide
    rpmrush , November 25, 2009 8:00 PM
    Damn, very impressive impovements on a decent processor. The effect should be magnified on weaker processors and I hope will give Netbooks with Ion a bit of surfing power.
Other Comments
  • 10 Hide
    rpmrush , November 25, 2009 8:00 PM
    Damn, very impressive impovements on a decent processor. The effect should be magnified on weaker processors and I hope will give Netbooks with Ion a bit of surfing power.
  • Display all 42 comments.
  • 0 Hide
    frozenlead , November 25, 2009 8:02 PM
    cooldudeawesome!

    It's interesting to see that youtube didn't get a boost. Perhaps because it relies on connection speed more? It also depends on what you define as rendered; are the video loads counted toward that?
  • 19 Hide
    MU_Engineer , November 25, 2009 8:21 PM
    I wonder how many people didn't even see the graph or read the article but just clicked on the "Zoom" button below the girl in the Firefox tank top?
  • 0 Hide
    dragonsqrrl , November 25, 2009 8:47 PM
    great news, I'm glad to see more and more commonly used applications taking advantage of GPU acceleration to improve system performance, even if its just a matter of ms. and i agree, we should see an even greater performance boost for ion netbook users.
  • -4 Hide
    rambo117 , November 25, 2009 8:59 PM
    but can it play... oh, nevermind
  • 2 Hide
    tpi2007 , November 25, 2009 9:05 PM
    With this and Flash being also GPU accelerated, I can finally have several tabs from one session to another without waiting so much time! It's good news in general, and about time, sites are getting more and more complex, all the processing power that our pc's have should be put to good use!
  • -3 Hide
    matt87_50 , November 25, 2009 9:47 PM
    how about power usage? huh? meh, can't complain about that anyway, thats progress. good to see. and a million netbooks around the world together weeped. (as they should!)

    I thought the term Direct2D died out at the turn of the century? pretty sure you just have to use Direct3D in 2D.

    GDI sucked on XP, when it was hardware accelerated, but it wasn't even hw accelerated in vista or win 7?

    I'd dare say that just bypassing GDI and direct software rendering to the window buffer would be fast enough, especially on a 920. my Wolfenstein clone ran at 100s of frames a second using that method.

    I mean, its good to see them using all the processing power, just as long as it can fall back to software methods. for instance, you could get problems like not being able to run direct X programs across remote desktop.
  • 1 Hide
    falchard , November 25, 2009 9:51 PM
    Does this mean I can make a DirectDraw input using FireFox to make the best looking browser based game of all time?
  • 1 Hide
    Supertrek32 , November 25, 2009 10:02 PM
    I'd like to see power consumption charts on GPU-assisted vs non GPU-assisted renders. Which takes more power: everything on cpu, or some cpu and some gpu?
  • 0 Hide
    dmuir , November 25, 2009 11:05 PM
    I would have expected them to use something cross platform... But maybe there isn't a good lib for that?
  • 0 Hide
    AtuBrian , November 25, 2009 11:13 PM
    looks good
  • -4 Hide
    mianmian , November 25, 2009 11:19 PM
    So it could save few ms per page. Does it really matter?
  • -2 Hide
    matt87_50 , November 25, 2009 11:43 PM
    falchardDoes this mean I can make a DirectDraw input using FireFox to make the best looking browser based game of all time?


    why would you want to? the point of a browser game is that it works on all the platforms the browser works on, Direct Draw or whatever is Windows only. be pretty much like making a windows game that also requires you to have firefox.

    supertrek32I'd like to see power consumption charts on GPU-assisted vs non GPU-assisted renders. Which takes more power: everything on cpu, or some cpu and some gpu?


    would be interesting, but I'd say it would be pretty much the same as going from non aero glass to aero glass. vista and windows 7 wind up using more power than XP (though I'm not entirely sure if its because of this...).

  • 4 Hide
    randomizer , November 26, 2009 12:50 AM
    What is on Google's home page that gains such a boost from acceleration when something as bloated and covered in images as Youtube does not?
  • 3 Hide
    groveborn , November 26, 2009 1:05 AM
    randomizerWhat is on Google's home page that gains such a boost from acceleration when something as bloated and covered in images as Youtube does not?

    YouTube has videos. Google has text. Text is 2d, videos are directplay.
  • 4 Hide
    Anonymous , November 26, 2009 1:05 AM
    why not an OpenGL browser and desktop
  • -1 Hide
    liquidsnake718 , November 26, 2009 1:06 AM
    Great Browser based games are too rare.... Im talking about at least 8600gt or even 8800gt graphics type browser based games.... This would be great especially GPUs like Fermi or perhaps the 5800series being able to support and boost browser graphics and flash videos....
  • 0 Hide
    tipoo , November 26, 2009 1:09 AM
    Anyone see the actual IE9 benchmarks? Even with GPU acceleration, its slower than some of the faster browsers. Granted, its probalby not even in the alpha stage yet, but still...You gotta wonder how fast the current fastest browsers would be with GPU acceleration...And once it becomes standard, if speed will become a moot point.
  • 0 Hide
    ravewulf , November 26, 2009 1:40 AM
    I said it when GPU acceleration was announced for IE9, and I'll say it again for FF:

    SWEET! :D 
  • 4 Hide
    False_Dmitry_II , November 26, 2009 2:01 AM
    What about linux? That looks like it would only accelerate in windows.
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