GPU-Computing meets Internet Explorer 9

[CarstenS]

Seems like Microsoft has taken a liking in using GPUs now: IE9 said to be using accelerated SVG, Javascript etc.:
http://blogs.nvidia.com/ntersect/2010/03/visual-computing-has-another-killer-app.html
Today, with introduction of Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft gives us another milestone for visual computing. Internet Explorer 9 includes a new JavaScript engine, support for HTML5 and hardware accelerated graphics and text. Internet Explorer 9 is the first browser designed to take advantage of modern hardware, resulting in graphics and performance improvements throughout the browser including the first to deliver hardware accelerated scalable vector graphics( SVG); the first to enhance JavaScript engine performance with the benefit of shifting from the CPU to the GPU; and the first to deliver GPU-Powered HTML5.


No word though on the API. Hopefully it'll be Direct Compute 4.x!

[trinibwoy]

Sweet. Intel will be pissed :lol:

[EduardoS]

Does this imply new JS functions to use GPU?

Sometime ago I had a talk about an hypothetic multi-threaded ECMA Script interpreter and the unavoidable "it's impossible", an interpreter for GPUs without extensions that is actually fast looks so... Magic...

[Jawed]

My worry with this is that GPUs currently have no context switching responsiveness guarantees, some fuckwit somewhere told Microsoft not to put this stuff into WDDM yet, "our hardware won't be ready" - it's easy to hurt system responsiveness because the GPU is running an intense kernel.

So, imagine what happens when someone's junk web page code gets a hold of your GPU :sad: It's bad enough with Flash right now.

Also imagine the pain that GPGPU developers will have with a simple browser interfering with their code. Actually, generally speaking, the interference that browsing will inflict on "valid" compute kernels...

Jawed

[Colourless]

Mostly its using Direct2D for accelerated rendering.

[Silent_Buddha]

Hmmm, it'll be interesting to see how this affects me when I have 8 windows with average 10 tabs each open while playing a GPU stressing game...

I wonder if there will be a user toggle to enable/disable GPU assisted browsing? Probably not...

Regards,
SB

[Squilliam]

I wonder if this is because of some sort of deal between them and AMD. I.E. They implement certain key 'future is fusion' changes to their products and AMD takes the time to make them a sexy custom X86 console system on a chip for a good price? This could effectively be a part of a payment already being made to AMD for their future console chip.

[Squilliam]

Hmmm, it'll be interesting to see how this affects me when I have 8 windows with average 10 tabs each open while playing a GPU stressing game...

I wonder if there will be a user toggle to enable/disable GPU assisted browsing? Probably not...

Regards,
SB

It would only be a problem whilst its rendering, right? However I suspect that when in full screen mode if there was continued pressure on the GPU the browser would suspend state until you quit or alt-tabbed.

[Tokelil]

I think the Nvidia blog post is a bit unclear, at least I understand it a bit differently when reading the official IE9 blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/03/16/html5-hardware-accelerated-first-ie9-platform-preview-available-for-developers.aspx

As I understand it there is no GPU/Javascript bindings or anything like that. There is hardware accelerated drawing with Direct2D and DirectWrite, hardware accelerated <canvas> drawing, image resizing/scaling and stuff like that.

Javascript is taking advantage of "modern" hardware, because it now JIT/optimizes on a background thread, ie. using more than one core.

I wonder if this is because of some sort of deal between them and AMD. I.E. They implement certain key 'future is fusion' changes to their products and AMD takes the time to make them a sexy custom X86 console system on a chip for a good price? This could effectively be a part of a payment already being made to AMD for their future console chip.Actually only Intel hardware are mentioned in the IE9 blogpost.

[Squilliam]

Actually only Intel hardware are mentioned in the IE9 blogpost.

That slightly blows my theory out of the water.

[Ike Turner]

AMD has a similar blog post on the developer site:
http://blogs.amd.com/developer/2010/03/16/ie9-takes-advantage-of-the-gpu/
They've also added this update yesterday: "3/19/10 — Minor edit. Got a little ahead of myself; Microsoft did not announce they were supporting <canvas>. However, they did say that all of Internet Explorer 9’s graphics, text, and rendering will be hardware accelerated. Given the embraced HTML5 across DOM, CSS3, SVG, and XHTML, it will be fun to watch this space closely as the IE9 Preview gets updated in the weeks to come."