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With Microsoft releasing the first Internet Explorer (IE) 9 beta yesterday, the spotlight is squarely on Internet Explorer. Hardware acceleration is among the several advancements that IE 9 boasts over its predecessors. It is something that Google's Chrome does not currently have. Thankfully for Chrome users, they will not have to wait too long for hardware-accelerated graphics to show up in their favorite browser.
The latest Chromium “trunk” and Chrome “canary” builds already feature some of the relevant enhancements. Hardware acceleration will be part of the next major release of the browser, Chrome 7, which is just round the corner.
“2D canvas acceleration is now available in trunk and the canary build by using the --enable-accelerated-2d-canvas command-line switch (coming to the developer channel shortly).We’ve also been hard at work improving our 3D graphics stack,” Google said in a recent blog post.
According to James Robinson, a software engineer at Google, “Chromium already achieves some impressive gains on the recent IE9 Platform Preview Test Drive 2D canvas demo,” with initial results suggesting up to 60x speed improvement over previous Chrome versions.
Comments are closed on this article
etsugua
September 16, 2010 at 11:06am
is google capping fps at 60? seems odd that they all top-out at the same number
Taz0
September 17, 2010 at 4:04am
As an avid advocator of v-sync, I don't see the point of rednering more frames than your monitor can display, unless you want fugly tearing. So as far as I'm concerned, a cap of 60 FPS (v-synced or not), is pretty logical.
Also, it's interesting to see Google using Microsoft's benchmarks. I guess they examined them and decided that they're browser agnostic, and thus fair. In any case, IE9 beta is working really nicly for me (and stable - zero issue so far). It's pretty zippy.
Chrome should really also benchmark using Microsoft's 'definitive' benchmark at www.WebVisBench.com.
praetor_alpha
September 16, 2010 at 9:51am
So when we will be talking about IE14, Firefox 7, and Directx 18, we will be talking about how Chrome 65 renders pages in -4 seconds and gets infinity FPS?
Virgnarus
September 16, 2010 at 7:29am
Dynotaku, did you happen to use the switch --enable-accelerated-2d-canvas ?
Dynotaku
September 16, 2010 at 8:57am
Hah hah wow now it's even less than 1 FPS. Maybe I'm not putting the command in right.
Right click on the icon in the task bar, then right click again on "google chrome" then properties then add the switch at the end right?
C:\Users\folders\chrome.exe --enable-accelerated-2d-canvas
Just like that right? Do I need " around the path or something?
Dynotaku
September 16, 2010 at 8:50am
No I had some other command in there that some tech blog insisted was the right one. I'll give this a shot.
