GPU acceleration coming to a web browser near you

In the last few weeks, web browser developers have announced that GPU hardware acceleration will be standard features on the leading Windows web browser including Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) and Firefox. These browsers will take advantage of the new Direct2D API in Windows 7 for rendering menus, graphics, animations, maps etc.  Microsoft has for example talked about 60 frames per second for rendering Bing maps in IE 9 using the GPU, compared to 14 frames a second in IE8 using the current CPU graphics implementation.

In addition to 2D acceleration, there are several 3D solutions being developed. Google has announced O3D, a JavaScript API for creating GPU-accelerated 3D graphics applications that run via a plug-in in a browser window (for games, ads, 3D model viewers, product demos, virtual worlds, etc). O3D maximizes performance by programming to the GPU’s shader language directly.  The Khronos Group has detailed WebGL, a plug-in free effort to support GPU-accelerated 3D graphics in web pages using JavaScript and HTML 5.