Microsoft and NVidia are making a big news splash today with the demonstration and announcement of the upcoming Internet Explorer 9, which features GPGPU acceleration in the rendering engines.
Internet Explorer 9 includes a new JavaScript engine, support for HTML5 and hardware accelerated graphics and text. Internet Explorer 9 is the first browser designed to take advantage of modern hardware, resulting in graphics and performance improvements throughout the browser including the first to deliver hardware accelerated scalable vector graphics( SVG); the first to enhance JavaScript engine performance with the benefit of shifting from the CPU to the GPU; and the first to deliver GPU-Powered HTML5.
I’m excited to see just how much they can offload to the GPU, but I have to really wonder if GPGPU browsers are doing the open-nature of the internet a disservice. What will happen with websites start flashing “Sorry, you must have an NVidia GeForce 480GTX or better to view this page” the way they do for Flash and Java now?
NVidia’s press release makes a few other claims that I’ld like to put out for discussion/debate:
- “Microsoft has always been a leader in visual computing.”
- “They were the first to make a visual computing application everyone would use when they released Windows Vista.” – Video Encoders? Photoshop?
- ” This was the first time an operating system was accelerated by a GPU.” – Hasn’t OSX had GPU acceleration for longer? Linux? Irix (for those old enough to remember Irix)?
Discuss it in the comments.
via nTersect Blog – Visual Computing Has Another Killer App.
I used the Explore 9 last fall and it crashed my computer, lost of lot of files that was not program files that is not in a normal back up, read lot of reveiws after my crash, and explore crashed un-limited computers when used, have MS fixed the issues that cause the crashing of the computers????
all in all i’m pretty darn impressed with ie 9 so far anyway i have had the beta for a while now and i truly believe microsoft will make headway’s with this one
It sounds like IE9 is taking advantage of generic GPGPU support within the Direct2D engine, which is a sensible way of approaching things, and should hopefully avoid any silliness with needing specific browser/GPU combinations to view a site.
Much as I love NVidia’s products, their outrageous claims are getting worse and worse. IRIX did indeed have GPU acceleration in the X server for … donkey’s years … longer than I can remember. Nice to see NVidia and MS coming to the party but they must be, what, 20 years late? 4DWM still remains one of the fastest UIs around.
Although I’m impressed the performance of Windows 7 and Direct2D, I’m finding very little information that confirms that anything more than compositing and backing store for windows is being offloaded to the GPU.
If you go back to the original Direct2D talk that Microsoft posted this summer, you’ll see they made great strides speeding up their core 2D engine — path rasterization, stroking, font management, compositing, etc. I watched it carefully for claims about GPGPU usage and there were few beyond window/buffer management.
NVIDIA’s blog post seems to jump on the hazy GPU claim bandwagon as well.
So I’m dubious this announcement is much more than IE9 being overhauled to use Direct2D which happens to be GPU-aware (which is to be applauded).
Maybe someone from Microsoft can provide a bullet list of items being powered by the GPU.