Tag: GPU

We've spent a lot of time jabbering on and on and on about hardware acceleration in the next generation of Web browsers. The problem, however, is that no stable browsers have it turned on by default. Unless you're running Firefox 4 beta or Internet Explorer 9 RC, you're probably not enjoying hardware acceleration. Heck, our latest poll shows that almost 50% of Download Squad readers run Chrome, ...

Gamers and other enthusiasts know the importance of keeping their video card's drivers current, but it's not something the vast majority of the computing public pays any attention to. If the computer is running OK, there's no need to update drivers, right? As it turns out, there's a very good reason to update: your old driver might be causing your Web browser to crash excessively. That's ...

Internet Explorer 9 isn't the only pony in the hardware accelerated rendering race. Just about everyone is getting in on the GPU action, and Google's offering up some new partner-created demos to show what Chrome can do. The WebGL-powered demos include a wall of photos by CoolIris, virtual aquarium, an animated grassy field, and a slick little paint-your-own-figurine -- on which I wasted far ...

After yesterday's announcement that Chrome 7 is now hardware accelerated, I instantly wanted to get the major browsers back into the ring for another screencasted deathmatch. Back when I did the 4-way speed test, only Firefox and Internet Explorer 9 featured hardware acceleration, and as a result Opera and Chrome were many orders of magnitude slower. If you watch the video, however, you'll see ...

I think the video speaks for itself! digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/06/23/internet-explorer-9-vs-chrome-6-developer-video-speed-benchmark'; If you can't watch the video: IE9 is some orders of magnitude faster than Chrome when it comes to hardware-accelerated canvas rendering. In some other initial benchmarks, IE9 is about 30% slower than Chrome 6 in the SunSpider ...

VLC is an excellent alternative media player, and one that's extremely popular with our readers. That doesn't mean it's issue-free, of course. VLC still struggles from time to time with high def video, though that's about to change with the upcoming 1.1 release. Developers are hard at work bolting on GPU acceleration to the app, and the results look good so far. Forum user riderx's CPU ...

It's already been pretty widely reported that Internet Explorer 9 will feature better support for standards -- including HTML5. We also know it's going to take advantage of your GPU via Direct2D and DirectWrite. Now, a blog post from the folks at AMD has revealed the IE9 will support Direct2D hardware acceleration for the <canvas> element. Here's what AMD's Robin Maffeo had to say: "The ...

You thought GPU-accelerated fonts in Firefox were cool...? Well, Internet Explorer 9 will go one HUGE step further: GPU-accelerated HTML5. Websites will, at long last, be hardware accelerated -- as long as you're using IE9 anyway. I have no idea why we've had to wait quite this long for DirectX utilization in the browser. Zooming, scrolling, physics -- all REALLY fast, really smooth. They ...

Yesterday you read about Mozilla's effort to boost Firefox's Javascript processing speed with the new JägerMonkey engine. Now Asa Dotzler has blogged about another feature -- freshly landed in the Firefox nightly builds -- which should speed up the 'fox even more. The gfx.font value above is a new about:config value which toggles GPU accelerated rendering via DirectX 11's DirectWrite and ...

We told you a while back about how the latest version of Adobe Flash supports using your computer's graphics processing unit (GPU) to speed up video playback. Well, Adobe has even bigger plans for GPU acceleration in its video apps, and maybe even in Photoshop. Adobe blogger John Nack lays out all the details in a new post, including plans to optimize for specific GPU models. Photoshop is ...