There are just a few days left until Microsoft will launch Internet Explorer 9 Beta, with the Beauty of the Web event on September 15th getting closer and closer, and the company notes that it is welcoming the competition from rival browsers in terms of hardware acceleration, but that IE9 is best in breed in this regard.
Hardware acceleration involves leveraging the computer’s GPU (graphics processing unit) in concert with DirectX APIs in order to enhance graphics performance for all webpage content.
Ted Johnson, Program Manager Lead for Web Graphics notes that while Internet Explorer 9 offers full hardware acceleration, the other browsers support it only partially, and as such are bound to deliver an inferior performance to users.
Until the fourth Platform Preview of IE9, Microsoft had enabled hardware acceleration by default, and applied it to a wide variety of elements on a webpage, from text, to images, backgrounds, borders, SVG content, HTML5 video and audio, but also HTML5 canvas.
Johnson noted that there are three steps in page rendering in IE9:
“Content Rendering. IE9 accelerates the first phase, Content Rendering, using Windows’ Direct2D and DirectWrite subsystems