Microsoft's IE9 team have explained the way in which the forthcoming browser will utilise hardware acceleration, and indicated their excitement about the use of HTML5.
In a detailed analysis post on the IE blog, Microsoft's Lead Program Manager for IE Performance Jason Weber showed off IE9's hardware acceleration in relation to the Flying Images feature, and how the browser's use of the graphics processor enabled a much richer experience.
"The first thing that you'll notice is that Internet Explorer 9 utilizes the GPU and is able to move the images in real-time at 60fps," comments Weber.
"More importantly, Internet Explorer 9 is able to achieve this real-time performance only using 12% of the total CPU and 15% of the total GPU.
"Using the CPU, Internet Explorer 9 can execute the machine code on each move to quickly determine the next location for the images and then move them through the CSS layout process.
"It then hands off the display of these images to the GPU, which through specialized hardware efficiently updates the screen. Since the CPU and GPU perform execution in parallel, additional computation can be occurring on the CPU while the GPU is updating the screen."
HTML5 excitement
Weber also talked about how excited the team is by the possibilities of HTML5, the next major revision of the markup language of the World Wide Web.
"It's clear that HTML5 will enable a new class of applications that were previously not possible through standards based markup, and these applications can't be limited by the performance of today's browsers," concluded Weber.
"Doing HTML5 right means enabling developers to build web applications that have the performance of desktop applications.
"That's our objective with Internet Explorer 9 and why we're so excited about hardware acceleration."
