Posted on Monday, August 30 2010 @ 14:09 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Following the lead of other major browser makers, Google revealed last week that Chrome 7 will add support for hardware acceleration to speed up rendering. Chrome will separate the rendering of a web page into independent layers, and some of these will be offloaded to the new GPU sandbox process to accelerate compositing.
Traditionally, web browsers relied entirely on the CPU to render web page content. With capable GPUs becoming an integral part of even the smallest of devices and with rich media such as video and 3D graphics playing an increasingly important role to the web experience, attention has turned on finding ways to make more effective utilization of the underlying hardware to achieve better performance and power savings. There's clear indication that getting the GPU directly involved with compositing the contents of a web page can result in very significant speedups. The largest gains are to be had from eliminating unecessary (and very slow) copies of large data, especially copies from video memory to system memory. The most obvious candidates for such optimizations are the
More info can be read at
Google Chromium. The GPU acceleration is already available in the latest builds of Chrome, but it has to be activated manually by launching Chrome with the following command line flag: "-enable-accelerated-compositing".