IE9 Flaunts Hardware-Accelerated Canvas 265
An anonymous reader writes "Over on the IE blog they have a rundown of IE9's hardware accelerated support for the canvas element. They write, 'With the recent release of the latest IE9 platform preview, we talked about how we're rebuilding the browser to use the power of your whole PC to browse the web, and to unlock a new class of HTML5 applications. One area that developers are especially excited about is the potential of HTML5 canvas. Like all of the graphics in IE9, canvas is hardware accelerated through Windows and the GPU. In this blog post we discuss some of the details behind canvas and the kinds of things developers can build.'"
Re:what about the video tag? (Score:4, Informative)
Er... I'm pretty sure that MS said they would support the video tag back when IE9 was announced. A few months back, they said which format it would support (H.264), although just a week or two ago MS said they would also support WebM if the codec was installed.
Re:just the canvas? (Score:3, Informative)
The whole browser is hardware accelerated by the new Direct2D and Directwrite API's. It's just that the biggest noticeable advantage is the speedup of the canvas element which is used to manipulate a lot of graphics. Firefox nightly alphas had it working before the first IE9 preview was released and it will be in FF 4.0. Firefox devs are also working on OpenGL acceleration for other platforms but that's much further away.
Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this (Score:5, Informative)
I tried these canvas-based apps on Windows 7 in various browsers.
The ones I tried work in Firefox 3.6.6, Opera 10.60, and Chrome 5.0.375.99.
On Firefox 3.6.6, they're all horrifically slow.
Opera 10.60 worked a little better than Firefox did, but not by much.
Chrome 5.0.375.99 worked about the same as Opera 10.60 did.
Note: My nVidia drivers are from back in November last year, due to a bug in newer nVidia drivers with the game Shattered Horizons. Not sure if that would affect rendering speeds or not.
Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this (Score:1, Informative)
And this time they would do it not by breaking standards,
You really believe this? Really? After Microsoft abandoning its *own* approved ISO standard for the busted ECMA document standard, the one that never passed ISO?
Shill or gullible. You pick.
--
BMO
Re:A house built on sand cannot stand. (Score:2, Informative)
Welcome to web developer world. Standard complaint code usually works in most of browsers and IE is always an exception.
Re:Does IE9 Support Web Standards or Dump ActiveX? (Score:2, Informative)
Your ridiculous whining has nothing to do with standards, or with activex.
Re:Does IE9 Support Web Standards or Dump ActiveX? (Score:0, Informative)
Re:A house built on sand cannot stand. (Score:3, Informative)
Your list of bugs would be extremely valuable to the IE team. I suggest sending it along, or at least seeing if they're addressed with the IE9 platform preview build.
Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this (Score:3, Informative)
The provided demos really specifically test how fast the browser can draw N images (or whatever), with variations (alpha channel, scaling etc). I don't see what's wrong with such a test if you want to specifically test 2D rendering performance.
Re:The message this sends me (Score:3, Informative)
Every time I hear "hardware accelerated" associated with the browser, I feel as though they have essentially given up trying to unbloat their browser and operating system so they are trying to make up for it by pushing off such tasks to the hardware. ... Other browsers get by just fine without hardware acceleration.
So fine, indeed, that Safari [gadget-space.com] has already added it, and Firefox [icrontic.com], Chrome [google.com] and Opera [avencius.nl] are all scrambling to implement it.
Seriously, have you even seen the demos? It's not about "needs acceleration to be as fast as other browsers" at all. It's about "5-10x faster than browsers without acceleration".
Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds? (Score:3, Informative)
Their Acid3 score has gone up from 68/100 to 83/100 since the last platform preview, so yeah, it seems they're definitely making progress. IE8 only scored 20/100.
This is a little different (Score:3, Informative)
DirectDraw was just basic graphics acceleration. Mostly what DD offered was the ability to write things quickly to video memory, as one could do in DOS. It had support for blitting, calling page flips, and so on. More or less the kind of stuff you could do when you had low level access to everything in the system, but which you couldn't really do with a GUI in the way directly.
This all got deprecated by default with the advances in Direct3D and so on. You could just use a texture quad to do all that to the extent it was still needed. Most programs these days aren't concerned with quickly pushing a bunch of raw pixels to the screen.
Ok well Direct2D is a vector graphics API. It is to allow you to design 2D scenes that scale well to any size, and then its partner DirectWrite handles all the nice n' flashy font stuff. Part of the idea is to be able to easily do resolution independent user interfaces and such. DirectDraw wasn't for that at all, and the GDI isn't all that well suited for it. Direct2D is easy interfaces to allow you to draw custom, scalable, content. Could all be done with D3D probably, and you need a card with some 3D features backing it up to use, but that would be rather complex.
The basic hardware accelerated rasterization is something that has just been assumed for years which is why you don't hear about it. The GDI would make use of graphics cards to accelerate basic drawing. However the new features are all about doing more than just speeding up putting pixels on the screen. Rather you have the graphics card actually do some heavy lifting and composite the image together. THAT allows for cool new 2D features, like truly resolution independent stuff. You tell the GPU "I want a line from here to here," it takes care of all the details.
Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this (Score:5, Informative)
Things like texture mapping, gradients, alpha blending, etc.. are just not efficient with GDI, and supporting them would only be for a single kind of plotting device (video cards) so it just doesnt make sense to roll those things up into GDI when there are HAL's specifically tailored for those purposes.
Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this (Score:3, Informative)
It's more or like, what you can do with those webkit- and moz- settings. like using css3 features already now. and so on. You can enhance specific browsers without breaking standards.
But MS does not enhance it with obviously local flavour, like naming their own finetuning tags "ms-" or "ie9-" or sth. They do crazy stupid exceptional stuff, that does not reveal itself and reinterprete standard tags breaking compatibility.
And that was horrible and we hope all, they never repeat it.