Opera Adds Support for Hardware Acceleration and WebGL, but It's Still Experimental

Opera may be a bit late to the game, but it's got big plans for Opera 12, the upcoming release. This is the version that will finally get hardware acceleration as well as WebGL support. What's more, it seems that Opera worked hard to get it right and is accelerating quite a bit of features, including the entire user interface.

"Hardware acceleration allows Opera to offload graphics rendering from the processor (CPU) to the graphics card (GPU). This makes graphics intensive operations such as animations faster," Opera's Tommy A. Olsen wrote.

"The ability to render with the GPU opens up the ability to render WebGL as well. WebGL allows programmers to write 3D games and fancy-looking demos for you to play with," he said.

No one is disputing the benefits of hardware acceleration. It offers better performance, significantly better, and it also opens up a lot more opportunities for web developers and web app makers. But only if it's done right.

Hardware acceleration - OpenGL for now, DirectX 9 and 10 later

For now, support is a bit experimental in Opera, but it's a solid first step. The first Opera 12 Alpha uses the OpenGL backend for acceleration, ensuring cross-platform support with the caveat of a performance hit on Windows.

However, support for DirectX 9 and 10 is on the way, ensuring that Opera will be hardware accelerated on Windows Vista and 7, but also on Windows XP, via the Microsoft provided API which is preferred over OpenGL.

Opera boasts about "full" hardware acceleration support. Specifically, Opera 12 uses the GPU to do the final compositing, the stage of the rendering process in which all of the elements in a page are put together, but also to render the UI.

At the same time, HTML5 Canvas elements are accelerated, as are CSS3 transitions and text rendering. Overall, it's a solid list and mostly on par with what the other browsers are offering.

However, due to the differences in the way browsers have implemented hardware acceleration and the platforms they support, it's hard to make a relevant and objective comparison.

Overall, when things are working as they should, Opera 12 should be significantly faster than Opera 11.

WebGL - 3D graphics in the browser

Support for hardware acceleration also leads the way to WegGL support. WebGL is a set of low level graphics APIs that make use of the GPU for graphics processing. It's been ratified as a standard and is supported by the Khronos Group, the one behind OpenGL.

Firefox and Chrome now offer full support for WebGL, but Opera 12 is hot on their trails.

Support is still experimental and buggy