Browsing the web is one of the most fundamental uses of a PC. Even though is mainly considered a simple and not very demanding task for the generic computer it is often harder than you might think. Websites become all the more advanced and use more and more heavy graphics. Now it seems like we’re entering a new era where our graphics cards will play an even more important role for our browsing.
Adobe presented the first version of Flash 10.1 that use your graphics card for playing flash-based functions like YouTube videos and such.
Microsoft has revealed some details on Internet Explorer 9 that will use the graphics circuit for accelerating the load of 2D elements of websites. The goal is to let the GPU do as much of the work as possible and then we’re talking both pictures and text being rendered with the help of the GPU.
This will be possible by by skipping Windows GDI interface for handling pictures and instead using Direct2D and DirectWrite. The result isn’t just better performance when rendering websites, but also better looking and easier to read fonts.
Microsoft has already presented some examples of the advantages of GPU accelerates browsers like scrolling through Bing Maps, which is a pretty demanding application and works a lot better with Internet Explorer 9 and GPU acceleration.
More on Internet Explorer 9 and its GPU acceleration in Microsoft IE Blog.
