IE9 six advantages of GPU hardware acceleration

At the recent MIX 10 conference, Microsoft demonstrated how to leverage the hardware acceleration capability of the graphics card GPU, in IE9 browser, new technologies such as Direct2D, DirectWirte, and XPS are used to render text, images, videos, SVG, and other network content. Today, Microsoft IE project manager Frank Olivier introduced the six advantages of these technologies.

1. performance, performance, and performance

This is clearly the biggest advantage of GPU hardware acceleration. The addition of Direct2D allows the browser to mobilize the GPU to optimize rendering of Rich graphics, resulting in faster Web program running speed and a better browsing experience.

GPU is a more suitable option for some graphic operations. For example, GPU is much faster than CPU when performing Alpha mixing and bilinear graphics scaling, you can also use the pixel shader to perform complex calculations per pixel.

IE9 can use the GPU to execute more tasks, and the CPU resources can be released to other browser subsystems for smoother animation and video playback.

2. ultra-fast zoom browsing

IE9 can use GPU to scale images and other content, and Its browsing speed is fast. You can try the map scaling demonstration provided by Microsoft.

Windows is still the only operating system that can change the size of all user interface elements in the browser. For the first time, IE8 enables default scaling of Web page content, and IE9 is further improved based on it, enables users to easily read Web content on a high DPI display.

3. Hardware-accelerated HTML5 video

IE9 uses the Windows Media Foundation (WMF) multimedia platform to play HTML5 standard videos. GPU acceleration can be achieved if a hardware video decoder is available. Otherwise, only the CPU can be used for playback. The IE9 video engine can directly use GPU to decode and output videos. After decoding a video frame, it will enjoy the same benefits as other bitmaps in the graphic assembly line.

On MIX 10, Microsoft used a netbook of less than $400 to play two 30% P high-definition videos at the same time. As a result, with the hardware acceleration of IE9, the CPU usage was less than, and it was very smooth, the CPU usage of playing a video in other browsers is also 100%, and the frame is severely dropped.

4. high-quality image and color support

IE9 uses Windows Image components (WIC) to decode PNG, JPEG, and newly added TIFF and jpeg xr images. Compared with JPEG, jpeg xr greatly improves compression efficiency and delivers higher image quality at the same size.

In addition to decoding speed up to 30% faster than IE8 decoder, the new WIC decoder can also read color configurations embedded in the image, including ICC v2 and ICC v4.

5. Text quality and performance

IE9 uses the DirectWrite API to execute text rendering and Output Using GPU, which is twice faster than IE8 and of higher quality. IE9 can achieve smooth text animation, while sub-pixel positioning can more faithfully experience the intent of Web and font designers.

Some users reported that some of the systems were blurred. Microsoft said it was working to solve the problem.

6. high-quality image printing

IE9 can directly convert the Web content to the XPS format when outputting it to the printing system to print high-quality HTML5 content. XPS is a more modern printing system with native support for opacity, complex paths, and other features, providing better fidelity and quality when printing modern Web content.

Note: Even if your system does not have a GPU available, because IE is based on Direct2D, each feature supports both hardware and software, therefore, we can still obtain high-quality software simulation results, but the efficiency will be lower.