Google Chrome to use hardware acceleration

[DaBees-Knees]

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=3237372

Google will follow the lead of Microsoft and Mozilla by offloading some browser chores to the graphics processor to speed up Chrome, the company has announced.

In an announcement on Friday, Google said it has added hardware acceleration to the newest build of Chromium, the open-source project that in turn provides the underlying technology for Chrome.

The feature is included with the latest Chromium 7.x build.

Browser hardware acceleration shifts some tasks from the PC's main processor to its graphics processor to boost performance, especially of graphics-intensive chores like rendering video or complex three-dimensional objects.

According to Google software engineer Vangelis Kokkevis, the hardware acceleration will speed up some tasks - rendering pixel-intensive video and WebGL, the HTML component that generates 3D graphics - but will still shunt the job of forming text and static two-dimensional images to the central processing unit, or CPU.

Google plans to join the crowd, but its initial effort will be only partial.

It seems good ideas spread like wildfire.