At last week’s MIX10 event, several people talked about NVidia driving IE9 with GPU acceleration, but ATI was there as well.  A new blog post from AMD reaffirms their own commitment to GPGPU, in particular the new IE9 features.  These two bullets in particular:

# GPU acceleration enables improved screen response, higher quality text as well as high-quality screen zooming. These features are enabled by the latest ATI Radeon™ HD graphics cards that support DirectX® 10 and DirectX® 11. This can help the browser experience be more intuitive, fluid and dynamic.

# Introduced with Windows® 7, Direct2D is a hardware-accelerated, immediate-mode 2-D graphics API that provides high performance and high-quality rendering for 2-D geometry, bitmaps and text. With IE9’s support of Direct2D and open HTML5 standards enabling richer multimedia tasks, AMD’s CPU and GPU technology can offer outstanding support for these rich graphical experiences.

Most of this is just PR fluff, as NVidia cards run Direct2D just as well. The one big win is that NVidia still doesn’t have a DX11 card on the market (Fermi will change that next week, if it’s actually available for purchase).  The one haunting bullet is this:

IE9 is expected to offer greatly increased JavaScript performance over prior versions of IE.  A new JIT will generate code based on the system’s processor, which we expect to provide an improved experience on AMD CPUs.

Could AMD have worked with Microsoft to ‘optimize’ the new JIT engine to work better with an AMD CPU + ATI GPU pairing?  I suppose it’s possible.  Most likely it’s still just PR fluff, but it does raise the question.

via Visualizing a More Vivid Internet at MIX10 | The Virtualization Blog.