Finally a reason to go Quad-GPU: IE9 to support HW acceleration

F

Farid

Artist formely known as Vysez
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http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/11/18/an-early-look-at-ie9-for-developers.aspx

It seems that the guys from the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft decided to ante up their game for IE9! I can sum-up that blog post, in an almost non sarcastic way (quite hard a feat for me), with the following: Almost standard compliant, less slower than its competitor with JS and support for Direct 2D.

Here's some video to demo the use of GPU accelerated vector graphics with D2D/DD with web apps: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/IE-9-Surfing-on-the-GPU-with-D2D/
 
direct2D sounds interesting but is vista/7 only.

I've always wanted a GPU-accelerated PDF viewer. Even if CPU and memory intensive, just render all the pages to textures, 100 dpi for everything, 400 dpi for the current page + previous/next one. (or such a similar scheme)
then let me do totally smooth scrolling and zoom. It strikes me than I can do this with a whole earth, complete with mountains, country borders, names and terabytes of image data, but always have to deal with those pdf in the same old boring way.
 
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Adobe Reader (just like all their free products) is pure garbage. Slow as molasses and buggy as hell. Foxit Reader is a million times better. Too bad there's no alternative to Flash.

Can anyone explain to me why scrolling through a large PDF is apparently too much work for Adobe Reader on a 4GHz Q9550 and an o/c'd GTX 285?
 
duh. thanks! though I've tried it, and no smooth scroll/zoom. perhaps it's only for additional document features. it does render and cache a lot of the document, but as far as I can tell 250MB of my video memory still sit unused.
BTW it's really the Realplayer of document viewing : silent install of mozilla plugin, 20MB start up process, stealing file association, explorer shell extension and a desktop icon. I'll stick to the windows version of evince. (faster except for not caching pages enough - I page up/page down scroll)

sorry for off-topic!
 
ShaidarHaran said:
Adobe Reader (just like all their free products) is pure garbage. Slow as molasses and buggy as hell. Foxit Reader is a million times better. Too bad there's no alternative to Flash.
Click to expand...

Adobe reader sucks horribly. Evince etc. are much faster. And flash is a pretty horrible way to serve videos on the web.
 
Hopefully whatever obnoxious things they decide to include like Flash are easy to turn off. Otherwise, I'll be more than happy to just block those websites. :p Yes, I'm an old curmudgeon, but I'll take a nice simple no flash, no cascading menus, no stylesheets, nothing fancy, easily navigable website over the dreck that fills the internet now days.

I'm actually dreading HTML5 more than the thoughts of someone making my GPU work harder while surfing the web.

Regards,
SB
 
I just turn flash on and off in IE if I need or don't need flash (by default it's off). I like that it's so relatively easy to do, just wish I could put a button on the IE interface to turn it off and on instead of going into a menu.

Regards,
SB
 
According to some results I saw this will tremendously accelerate page rendering.
Like rendering facebook.com 5ms faster.

WTF?!
 
Those CPUs should be fine(those CPUs are made primarily for web browsing after all). From my experience more RAM helps browser speed more than does CPU. 1GB should be enough, at 512MB I did notice a slight performance hit when multi-tabbing(there were delays when switching between tabs as the paging file was accessed) this was with WinXP and Firefox.
 
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that depends on the content. i.e., loading a page with hundreds of slahsdot.org comments : that takes a few seconds at 100% of one core on your modern, super fast computer, but that may be 20 seconds 100% CPU usage with total unresponsiveness from firefox on a slower CPU.
(you waste way more time and sanity reading the content, but that's a good technical example)

usually 512MB is fine for everything (firefox will use about 300MB to 400MB with 50 tabs)
if you don't block flash too, you may make the mistake of opening five links in tabs, each containing two/three flash animations.. leading to a total CPU saturation again. I've made a system crawl that way, unusable. Solution (on linux) is to drop to a text-mode console, and (with so much slow down that even the console is slow) kill -9 the firefox.

another big cpu drain : restoring a firefox session (usually after installing an extension, crash or kill -9'ing it).
when I do that on old PC (P4 2.0GHz w/ 512MB, presumably a bit faster than atom) I launch top with is a kind of task manager, look at it and watch firefox's memory usage increase while CPU usage is 99%/100% (sometimes goes down to 50%). when memory has stopped increasing, that means it's finished, so I can get back to the web pages.

note that firefox has a useful option : saving your session when you quit it. except it's only good for the last standing window. thus if I want to keep track of more than one window, I force kill it :)
 
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I never had that kind of system slowdowns in those scenarios happen to me on my old Athlon XP 2800+(WinXP) or my e5200(Win7).
 
Why would firefox ramping the CPU to max cause system unresponsiveness? That doesn't happen in windows, sounds like you're running a shite OS...

Then again, FF is shite too in the way it lets flash and such continue to run on background tabs. That's why the browser bogs down. Doesn't happen with IE, which is one reason why I prefer it over FF.
 
Hardware accelerated IE is nothing new, just run current or old IE`s on WindowsXP.
Drawing through Software is only happening on Vista and 7, as those have no Hardware-acc. for GDI drawing (Win 7 has partial acc. for GDI).
 
Blazkowicz said:
note that firefox has a useful option : saving your session when you quit it. except it's only good for the last standing window. thus if I want to keep track of more than one window, I force kill it :)
Click to expand...

LoL, I do the exact same thing with IE 8. Only problem with IE 8, if you are using InPrivate Browsing (nothing saved to HD, no cookies no history no nothing), then unfortunately there's no way to save that session.

And yeah, same experience on slower machines with restoring a session that I task kill. Makes everything a bit unresponsive for a while.

Regards,
SB
 
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