Windows 7: A Closer Look at IE 9 Hardware Acceleration.

A Closer Look at Internet Explorer 9 Hardware Acceleration Through Flying Images.

One of our objectives with Internet Explorer 9 is taking full advantage of modern PC hardware to make the browser faster. We’re excited about hardware acceleration because it fundamentally improves the performance of websites. The websites that you use every day become faster and more responsive, and developers can create new classes of web applications through standards based markup that were previously not possible. In this post, we take a closer look at how hardware acceleration improves the performance of the Flying Images sample on the IE9 test drive site.

When you run Flying Images across different browsers you’ll see that Internet Explorer 9 can handle hundreds of images at full speed while other browsers, including Internet Explorer 8, quickly come to a crawl.

Flying Images is a great example of the types of experiences that become possible with Internet Explorer 9’s hardware acceleration. Flying Images uses standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript markup to animate images, using a common coding pattern that you’ll find in many places on the web today, particularly inside JavaScript based games and animation frameworks which need real-time responsiveness with a frame-rate of 60 frames per second (considered real time).