Internet Explorer 9 To Get GPU Rendering
At PDC '09 Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live division, revealed the first details of the company's next browser, Internet Explorer 9. Even though the new browser is still in an early development stage, the first few builds are being tested internally. It is poised to come with some fancy improvements - including HTML5 and CSS3 support.
The most interesting improvements is that Internet Explorer 9 will move graphics and text rendering to the graphics chip, using DirectX's Direct2D. Sinofsky showed several demonstrations, one of which showed the difference between non-GPU and GPU rendering: Bing Maps did about 14fps without using the GPU, and up to 60fps while using the GPU.
Internet Explorer 9 will also come with a new JavaScript engine, as well as better standards support - including HTML5 and CSS3. This means that this new version of Internet Explorer finally gets the features other browser have had for a while.
