AMD Fusion APUs and Radeon GPUs Accelerate Microsoft's IE9 Browser

AMD has just announced that its Radeon graphics cards, as well as Fusion APUs, offer hardware-based graphics acceleration in Microsoft's IE9 browser, enabling the company to deliver a rich multimedia experience without having to give up on battery life or increase the power demand of the system.

Compared to other desktop browsers, Internet Explorer 9 uses the Direct2D, DirectWrite and Microsoft's Media Foundation framework to accelerate the video graphics and text rendering by harnessing the power of the system's GPU.

“You've heard of the ‘best of the best', and by combining Internet Explorer 9 with AMD's incredible computing platforms, we're effectively delivering the ‘best of the next,” said John Taylor, director of Client Product and Software Marketing, AMD.

“Better applications, video playback, gaming and general Web page interactivity will define the next-generation web experience.

“Through combining our award-winning AMD Radeon graphics cards, or AMD Fusion APUs with DirectX11-capable graphics, with Internet Explorer 9 we're helping users to unlock the full potential of their PC,” concluded the company's rep.

AMD's first generation Fusion chips were unveiled at the beginning of January and have managed to become quite popular among notebook and motherboard manufacturers as they offer advanced multimedia capabilities and low power consumption while also featuring a low price tag.

Right now, Fusion APUs are available in two versions, dubbed Ontario and Zacate, and their TDP is rated at 9W and 18W, respectively.

However, both versions feature one or two out-of-order Bobcat processing cores as well as an integrated GPU that packs 80 stream processors, 8 texturing units and 4 ROP units.

The clock speeds of the on-die graphics core differ according to the TDP of the chip, as the 9W parts are clocked at 280MHz while the 18W chips are clocked at 500MHz, but both chips families feature the UVD 3 media-decoding engine that accelerates video playback.