Hey guys, I found an article you guys may be interesting in reading. To sum it up, Firefox and IE 9 will be integrating Direct2D into its browser. According to the benchmarks, facebook and Twitter will have their rendering times cut in more than half. Also Microsoft showed, "that IE8 can render Bing maps at 14 frames per second. With hardware acceleration in IE9 turned on, he got 60 frames per second" Do you guys think its about time or are you not really bothered about this? Anyway, I just had to post this here on gamedev since there are so many people who think, sleep and dream in framerates.

Yeah it's good. There's lots of pages with hundreds of DIV elements which cause my browser to chugggg when scrolling around the page. Faster draw times could help here.

However, I'm picturing lazy developers who will make bloated sites that work fine in IE9/etc, and completely kill other browsers ;)

I've been curious how this will effect the HTML5 elements like video and canvas. Should be interesting.

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
However, I'm picturing lazy developers who will make bloated sites that work fine in IE9/etc, and completely kill other browsers ;)

Probably going to happen, only really an issue until other browsers catch up. Doesn't really mean they're lazy - case in point, sites like facebook and twitter are stressing current technology. We'll continue to push the amount of content per page, will always need optimization

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
Yeah it's good. There's lots of pages with hundreds of DIV elements which cause my browser to chugggg when scrolling around the page. Faster draw times could help here.

However, I'm picturing lazy developers who will make bloated sites that work fine in IE9/etc, and completely kill other browsers ;)

What websites are you visiting that you actually notice a slowdown in?
Seriously, I must be missing out or something because my browser speed is one of the least noticeable thing I notice and I spend a lot of time surfing the web. I take that back... there is actually only 1 website I ever noticed a slowdown and thought it was my crappy net connection but later found out it was actually because of Flash. I tried watching some HULU video's on my mac mini and I couldn't get through an entire clip without the video seemingly freezing up at some point. I hear they have a new Flash beta that is supposed to fix this since it also makes use of the GPU now.
If anything having a crappy or flaky net connection is more noticeable IMO.
I guess there are people out there that actually notice this though since they have web browser benchmarks now like Peacekeeper. One thing I noticed is that Safari and Firefox are way faster than IE and I rarely use IE so maybe that's why I haven't noticed how slow it can be? Also, note that Safari passes the Acid3 test in terms of rendering and speed just fine too.
I'm all for GPU acceleration but it looks to me it's just going to be used as a gimmick to try to win browser mindshare.
Also, how is this going to be any different than Adobe introducing the same thing in Flash?
Despite Improvements Flash 10 on Mac, Linux Still Lags Behind Windows
Personally, I'd rather see more widespread use of HTML5 before this.
And by using Direct2D aren't they making this proprietary and a Vista/Win7 Windows only thing?

[Edited by - daviangel on November 27, 2009 1:39:07 AM]

Quote: What websites are you visiting that you actually notice a slowdown in?
Seriously, I must be missing out or something because my browser speed is one of the least noticeable thing I notice

same here + my computer is hardly top of the line (in fact it was the slowest I could buy at the time)

Perhaps this is useful for netbooks etc (ive heard theyre pretty slow)

Quote: Original post by zedz
Perhaps this is useful for netbooks etc (ive heard theyre pretty slow)

Except netbooks don't have powerful GPUs, either :)

This is a problem when building a platform - nobody can use it until it's built. So you build a rendering engine that can render 10,000x as many elements as rendering engines of today can handle: obviously websites of today won't benefit much because they're hardly pushing the limit as it is. But once the platform is in place, people can start to make use of it.

The main problem I can see is that the actual rendering of the page is only a tiny, tiny fraction of the total time it takes to display the page. Look at the benchmarks on that page: rendering times are measured in single digit milliseconds. Even if you can now render much faster, there's still a hell of a lot of processing that goes on in the CPU (&#106avascript, CSS, layout) that's not going to be offloaded...

Quote: Original post by daviangel

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
Yeah it's good. There's lots of pages with hundreds of DIV elements which cause my browser to chugggg when scrolling around the page. Faster draw times could help here.

However, I'm picturing lazy developers who will make bloated sites that work fine in IE9/etc, and completely kill other browsers ;)

What websites are you visiting that you actually notice a slowdown in?
Seriously, I must be missing out or something because my browser speed is one of the least noticeable thing I notice and I spend a lot of time surfing the web. I take that back... there is actually only 1 website I ever noticed a slowdown and thought it was my crappy net connection but later found out it was actually because of Flash. I tried watching some HULU video's on my mac mini and I couldn't get through an entire clip without the video seemingly freezing up at some point. I hear they have a new Flash beta that is supposed to fix this since it also makes use of the GPU now.
If anything having a crappy or flaky net connection is more noticeable IMO.
I guess there are people out there that actually notice this though since they have web browser benchmarks now like Peacekeeper. One thing I noticed is that Safari and Firefox are way faster than IE and I rarely use IE so maybe that's why I haven't noticed how slow it can be? Also, note that Safari passes the Acid3 test in terms of rendering and speed just fine too.
I'm all for GPU acceleration but it looks to me it's just going to be used as a gimmick to try to win browser mindshare.
Also, how is this going to be any different than Adobe introducing the same thing in Flash?
Despite Improvements Flash 10 on Mac, Linux Still Lags Behind Windows
Personally, I'd rather see more widespread use of HTML5 before this.
And by using Direct2D aren't they making this proprietary and a Vista/Win7 Windows only thing?

Quote:
Obviously we will aspire to deliver the highest quality and performance rendering on all platforms. There is no Linux alternative to Direct2D though. Partially because building a system like Direct2D is extremely complex, even when using Cairo's tesselation it is still very difficult to correctly use the Shaders for everything, deal with all the edges and provide subpixel text anti-aliasing. The trick here is that any implementation, needs to be -totally- complete, since software fallback is extraordinarily expensive because it requires the GPU and the CPU to synchronize. Causing stalls.

We are working on providing hardware acceleration for some operations on other platforms. It is a more difficult struggle though, and it would be foolish for us not to use more advanced systems when those are provided to us by the OS. Note we have always tried to support the best frameworks for all platforms. OpenGL is also poorly and inconsistently supported on Windows & Linux.

Basically D2D support got implemented first because it was alot easier, cairo supports multiple backends and it is an opensource project, so anyone who wants can try to write an equivalent or better backend that uses OpenGL (There is an experimental OpenGL backend called glitz available for cairo but its appearantly not good enough for inclusion in the official firefox build)

Opera have had this functionality planned for a while, too - you can preview it in this old WinGogi build. Unfortunately, as with a few other features they've previewed in the past (such as video element support) they haven't shunted this technology into the main version of the browser - probably because the existing renderer is more than fast enough as it is!