Fantastic Mr. Fox
Microsoft may be crowing about upcoming IE9's GPU-accelerated rendering capabilities, but it looks like Mozilla is hot on its rival's heels, as Firefox developers show off some new benchmarks for the browser's Direct2D support.
Microsoft said last week that its Internet Explorer 9 would be capable of using GPU acceleration and achieve up to 60 frames per second on rendering Bing maps, compared to a current 14 frames a second in IE8, but Firefox developer Bas Schouten reckons his team can beat those claims, and come out with a GPU accelerated product first.
"Interesting that we're doing Direct2D support in Firefox as well - I'll bet we'll ship it first. :)," wrote Chris Blizzard on Twitter last Thursday, responding to a tweet from a CNET journalist about IE9.
Then, this week, a blog post about DirectWrite and Direct2D tipped up by Schouten in which he says his team has "made significant progress and are now able to present a Firefox browser completely rendered using Direct2D, making intensive usage of the GPU (this includes the UI, menu bars, etc.)"
Schouten explained that Direct2D had been designed as a replacement for GDI and "functions as a vector graphics rendering engine, using GPU acceleration to give large performance boosts to transformations and blending operations."
Also, while Schouten said he wouldn't be posting any screenshots - "since it is not supposed to look much different" - he did outline some tech specs and a graphical representation of some benchmarks his team had put together.
