14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is building the next iteration of Internet Explorer to be able to take advantage of graphics advances in terms of the GPU (graphics processing unit), as well as Windows 7’s DirectX 11. The Internet Explorer 9 GPU-powered HTML5 evolution has at its core the DirectX 11 technology, specifically the Direct2D and DirectWrite APIs (application programming interfaces). What it actually implies for end users is that IE9 will leverage the graphics card in order to better render text, images, video and SVG (vector graphics). Frank Olivier, IE9 program manager, revealed a number of benefits associated with GPU-powered HTML5 in Internet Explorer 9.
1. Performance – Of course, one of the advantages of tapping additional resources on top of the CPU is that rendering rich graphics will be done at an increased speed, a move that will positively impact the overall performance of the browser.
“This results in faster web applications and a higher quality browsing experience for users and web developers. As IE9 does more work using the GPU, there is less CPU load, enabling other browser subsystems to do more, as well as enabling higher frame rates for smooth animation and video playback. The GPU is a much better choice for some graphical operations – for example, the GPU executes alpha blending and bilinear image scaling much faster than the CPU, and uses pixel shaders to perform complex per pixel calculations,” Olivier explained.
2. Zoomed browsing on steroids – All users have performed zooming actions with their browser at one point or another. Whether it will be done in order to get more detail on an image, or to focus on a specific portion of a map, zooming in Internet Explorer 9 has also been hardware-accelerated.
“Windows is still the only broadly used operating system that allows the users to change the size of all UI elements on the screen to improve readability and legibility on new high DPI displays on laptops and desktop computers. IE9 builds on the work done in Internet Explorer 8 (the first browser to zoom Web page content by default) to ensure that users can easily read the Web on high DPI displays,” Olivier stated.
3. Hardware-accelerated HTML5 video – With IE9, rendering plain vanilla video and especially HD video means using the Windows Media Foundation system in combination with the GPU or the hardware video decoder. In this regard, Microsoft was capable of delivering some impressive performance in a demo at MIX10. While rival browsers were running the processor for all it had just to play a single HD video, IE9 played two 720p HD videos and only used 30% of the CPU on a modest netbook.
“The IE video engine decodes video directly with and into the GPU. Once the video frames are decoded, they can be treated like any other bitmap in the graphics pipeline with full compositing and integration into the rendering system,” Olivier added.
4. Image and color quality – The enhancements delivered to image and color rendering to Internet Explorer 9 are bound to delight users, but certainly web-design professionals and photographers. Enhancements made to the browser mean that IE9 is not capable of decoding formats such as TIFF and JPEG XR, with the Windows Imaging Component (WIC), in addition to PNG and JPEG images. Decoders are not only an estimated 30% faster than what was available in IE8, but WIC can now also deal with embedded color profiles in images, specifically ICC v2 and v4 profiles.
5. Text quality and performance – “IE9 uses the GPU (via DirectWrite) to do text output – up to twice as fast as IE8, and with higher quality. Text can be smoothly animated in IE9, and sub-pixel positioning is a more faithful representation of the Web (and font) designer’s intent. (We’ve also heard your feedback about some fonts showing up ‘blurry’ on some systems; we are working on addressing this),” Olivier said.
6. High-quality graphics printing – IE9 is capable of converting web content into the native XPS format supported both by Vista and Windows 7, when a print command is made. The results will be immediately visible in terms of printing quality, and will offer prints that will not differ from what users see in their browser, even if the web content might contain opacity effects and complex paths, which would otherwise print improperly.
The work Microsoft is doing for Internet Explorer 9 hardware acceleration even helped Mozilla to spot a problem in their approach to embracing hardware acceleration with Firefox, according to Mike Shaver.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview is available for download here.