Firefox Getting GPU Acceleration, Maybe Before IE9

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.

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?

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?

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.

but can it play... oh, nevermind

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!

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.

Does this mean I can make a DirectDraw input using FireFox to make the best looking browser based game of all time?

Rule#31 on the pic

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?

I would have expected them to use something cross platform... But maybe there isn't a good lib for that?

looks good

So it could save few ms per page. Does it really matter?

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.




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...).

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?

YouTube has videos. Google has text. Text is 2d, videos are directplay.

why not an OpenGL browser and desktop

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....

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.

I said it when GPU acceleration was announced for IE9, and I'll say it again for FF:

SWEET!

What about linux? That looks like it would only accelerate in windows.

it is about time. I am not browsing around in a 633 celeron for any old reason. Damn, its been ten years of killing planet earth with motherboard piles of extinction. Time to wax the old hp6735....where did I go with that 233 anyway....

Wouldn't video thumbnails (such as those on the home page) be counted as 2D? Also, Slashdot is all text and got barely any improvement.

Finally, something to look forward to in the browser market. If Firefox gets 2D rendering out first, I'll switch to it and never go back.

How did you know?!

Cool, first flash GPU acceleration and now general web rendering acceleration. Hope it pans out, but I guess we'll see.

I was wondering about power consumption differences between gdi and direct2d? on a laptop that will be crucial - and also, what about speed and power differences with an igp chip?

Now is it just me but why do I get a feeling that going from 12 ms to 6 ms might look... exactly the same?

in most cases it will, but being one of those people with moms playing games on facebook for hours at a time, I know it isn't always the case.
If I could make her use the geforce 9400 in her laptop for them - simply by changing to firefox, I'm quite sure she'd start liking firefox.

What about OpenCL? That would make it easier sense OpenCL can be executed by GPUs and CPUs.

it won't be long before Microsoft will take advantage of GPU processing and code the whole OS to run on it