A Closer Look at Internet Explorer 9 Hardware Acceleration Through Flying Images

re: A Closer Look at Internet Explorer 9 Hardware Acceleration Through Flying Images

Doesn't Matter — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 06:08:43 GMT

It doesn't matter because IE9 is extremely fast and that's all that matters for the people who surf the web daily. Keep up the good work IE team.

re: A Closer Look at Internet Explorer 9 Hardware Acceleration Through Flying Images

David — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 06:32:37 GMT

@Reality Check: If OpenGL is the "only accepted system for high performance 2D and 3D" ... why are many (most?) Windows games written to use DirectX? What makes you think IE9 is 20 months away (that would be Jan 2012)? Why on earth would you write against OpenGL when the core technology, guaranteed to be present, is DirectX?

At everyone else - why is the focus on Acid and other corner case tests? The real problem seems to be that the specs can be misinterpreted, or simply take too long to get to the "approved/released" stage. See also the W3C comments about HTML5 being 2022 for "Recommendation" (vs 2010/2011 for candidate recommendation): http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#When_will_HTML5_be_finished.3F

re: A Closer Look at Internet Explorer 9 Hardware Acceleration Through Flying Images

Reality Check — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 04:02:28 GMT

OpenGL is the industry standard and only accepted system for high performance 2D/3D graphics. Building on Microsoft Windows only proprietary systems is a short sighted decision that you will regret. You have time to correct this before IE9 ships in 2012. Please consider this before IE9.

re: A Closer Look at Internet Explorer 9 Hardware Acceleration Through Flying Images

Matthew Raymond — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 19:25:54 GMT

@Chrome User: "When you turn on Firefox hardare acceleration yet just get a solid white screen. That doesn't seem very along."

I encountered that problem in a recent nightly build when I first load a page. It seems to go away if you switch to another tab and back. Support for D2D in Minefield is certainly glitchy, but it's not totally unusable.

While I don't have any benchmarks for you, my experience is that the most recent nightly build of Firefox with D2D enabled is faster than the IE9 Testdrive for SunSpider and roughly equivalent in performance on most of the Testdrive tests on the web site. The biggest performance issue I can see at the moment is that it's a bit slower (but faster than 3.6) with some of the SVG stuff like SVG-oids "Nebula mode", but you could argue that Canvas 2D is a better fit for that use case.

re: A Closer Look at Internet Explorer 9 Hardware Acceleration Through Flying Images

Chrome User — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 06:36:55 GMT

When you turn on Firefox hardare acceleration yet just get a solid white screen. That doesn't seem very along.

re: A Closer Look at Internet Explorer 9 Hardware Acceleration Through Flying Images

Chrome User — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 06:29:47 GMT

Opera seems pixelated on both OSX and Win7. They're cheating but the images are moving so quickly that it's hard to see the damage.

re: A Closer Look at Internet Explorer 9 Hardware Acceleration Through Flying Images

Bill — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 05:57:28 GMT

DK: They never said they ran on OSX at all.

re: A Closer Look at Internet Explorer 9 Hardware Acceleration Through Flying Images

Opera Pixels — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 05:45:57 GMT

I'm also seeing 60fps with Opera but the images look terrible. Opera must either have bugs with the image sizing code or they're cheating somehow to improve frames per second. Does anyone know how Opera resizes the images? IE9 seems to have the most crisp images. Opera the works. Firefox is somewhere in the middle.

re: A Closer Look at Internet Explorer 9 Hardware Acceleration Through Flying Images

DK — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 02:45:52 GMT

Results seem a little disingenuous. I'm getting 60 fps and lower CPU usage than the stats listed above for IE9 and I'm using Safari 4.0.5 on OS X 10.6. Did you decide to only run the test on 10.5?

It would be more honest to compare IE9 to at least the most recently released OS/Browser combination, if not the nightlies/betas for each.

re: A Closer Look at Internet Explorer 9 Hardware Acceleration Through Flying Images

toyotabedzrock — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 01:16:36 GMT

I think you conveniently left out Opera since it can hit 60+fps without using an entire core even on a machine with much lower specs than your workstation.

P.S. You should be using the newer Opera logo from the press resources area of there site.