34 replies to this topic

[The_Decryptor]

~Johnny, on 20 April 2012 - 20:49, said:

Opera say they want to be the "first true hardware accelerated browser", so I'm not sure how much is accelerated now, but they're planning on basically everything, including the UI and menus to be hardware accelerated (though a lot of the UI is already).

Mozilla recently had to disable hardware acceleration in menus due to random driver issues (Like the drop shadows sticking around after the menu was closed.). I don't see much point in using HW accel for rendering a menu though, unless you want to throw something like WebGL rendering in there.

[~Johnny]

The_Decryptor, on 21 April 2012 - 00:39, said:

Mozilla recently had to disable hardware acceleration in menus due to random driver issues (Like the drop shadows sticking around after the menu was closed.). I don't see much point in using HW accel for rendering a menu though, unless you want to throw something like WebGL rendering in there.

*shrugs* I suppose if they have the code they might as well do it and get everything running on the same code. But on Windows at least, DirectWrite text rendering is faster than normal GDI+ text rendering, so there's at least some tiny benefits to be had somewhere.

[+SharpGreen]

If you really want to be technical, the first fully HW accelerated browser (UI included) is Chrome for Android

Also I though IE9 just did HW acceleration for page content, instead of page content and UI.

[+ViperAFK]

_Heracles, on 20 April 2012 - 17:54, said:

Opera's OGL HWA in previous builds was atrocious and slowed things down immensely (instead of speeding it up) - I have no faith that they can deliver DX HWA which is any better.

OGL drivers on windows are often poor/buggy, give it a chance. its also still in early testing... Firefox's hardware accel used to suck in development, so did chrome's.

[ArialBlue]

ViperAFK, on 21 April 2012 - 02:15, said:

OGL drivers on windows are often poor/buggy, give it a chance. its also still in early testing... Firefox's hardware accel used to suck in development, so did chrome's.

Well the D3D10 HWA they added is slightly better. I still feel like they have the same issue as with OGL - it slows things down, not speeds them up for some reason.
Now it is less noticeable, but they should still keep HWA opt-in.

[The_Decryptor]

~Johnny, on 21 April 2012 - 00:57, said:

*shrugs* I suppose if they have the code they might as well do it and get everything running on the same code. But on Windows at least, DirectWrite text rendering is faster than normal GDI+ text rendering, so there's at least some tiny benefits to be had somewhere.

It still uses DirectWrite/Direct2D, it just doesn't use Direct3D for showing it on the screen.

I'm still not sure what Opera means by saying they want to be the first to be fully hardware accelerated, does that mean they'll do Theora/WebM decoding on the GPU? (Compared to Firefox that decodes on the CPU, and does colour space conversion/scaling/painting on the GPU)

[x-byte]

The_Decryptor, on 21 April 2012 - 05:13, said:

, does that mean they'll do Theora/WebM decoding on the GPU? (Compared to Firefox that decodes on the CPU, and does colour space conversion/scaling/painting on the GPU)

Yes. The blog post says the following:

Quote

You enable these features by setting both opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableHardwareAcceleration and opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableWebGL to 1,

[+ViperAFK]

_Heracles, on 21 April 2012 - 03:45, said:

Well the D3D10 HWA they added is slightly better. I still feel like they have the same issue as with OGL - it slows things down, not speeds them up for some reason.
Now it is less noticeable, but they should still keep HWA opt-in.

Did you use the FF4 alpha builds when they first started adding HWA? It was crap and slowed things down, because it was in early development

But yeah, its a good thing its opt-in until its optimized further.

[ArialBlue]

The_Decryptor, on 21 April 2012 - 05:13, said:

It still uses DirectWrite/Direct2D, it just doesn't use Direct3D for showing it on the screen.

I'm still not sure what Opera means by saying they want to be the first to be fully hardware accelerated, does that mean they'll do Theora/WebM decoding on the GPU? (Compared to Firefox that decodes on the CPU, and does colour space conversion/scaling/painting on the GPU)

x-byte, on 21 April 2012 - 08:23, said:

Yes. The blog post says the following:

That is impossible outside of CUDA / OpenCL. Then it is just very very unlikely / impractical and a massive amount of work.

Opera is just trolling, albeit, it would be nice if they added support for DXVA2.

Edited by _Heracles, 21 April 2012 - 14:26.

[+ViperAFK]

_Heracles, on 21 April 2012 - 14:25, said:

That is impossible outside of CUDA / OpenCL. Then it is just very very unlikely / impractical and a massive amount of work.

Opera is just trolling, albeit, it would be nice if they added support for DXVA2.

How are they trolling? The blog post does not specifically mention theora acceleration (or anything about video acceleration really) When they say "fully hardware accelerated", they are referring to that the UI of the browser should be accelerated as well, not just the web pages like other browsers do.

[ArialBlue]

ViperAFK, on 21 April 2012 - 14:38, said:

How are they trolling? The blog post does not specifically mention theora acceleration (or anything about video acceleration really) When they say "fully hardware accelerated", they are referring to that the UI of the browser should be accelerated as well, not just the web pages like other browsers do.

Trolling is claiming untrue things. For example, for Firefox, claiming full hardware acceleration without support of h264 / AVC, or claiming high performance while still greatly being outdone by competitors.

Yes, that is why my previous post specifically states why that is very very unlikely that someone would add hardware acceleration to WebM/Theora/RealVideo/Whatever.

AFAIK, UI acceleration is being done by Firefox without much success since version 4. IE10 has hardware acceleration done properly via Metro... eh,

[~Johnny]

The_Decryptor, on 21 April 2012 - 05:13, said:

I'm still not sure what Opera means by saying they want to be the first to be fully hardware accelerated

I believe they want to be the first cross platform browser that properly hardware accelerates on all platforms, unlike Firefox (which doesn't even bother outside of Windows), Chrome (not sure, but I don't think it has proper acceleration outside of Windows, and still isn't even fully accelerated on Windows anyway) & Safari.They've already hardware accelerated all over on mobile, and they're doing a good job getting the desktop there.

Though it's a testament to how hard a task it is trying to accelerate this kind of program with OpenGL is (needed for OSX & Linux accleration), when their single DirectX build is faster and more stable than all their previous OpenGL only accelerated builds they've been testing for months

[The_Decryptor]

The only platform Firefox doesn't accelerate the full UI on, is Linux (due to them using X11 surfaces and trying to get those to play nicely with OpenGL), that's being fixed though (Although as a result, it might be slower on some cards )

[~Johnny]

Aye, but on Mac, Firefox doesn't fully hardware accelerate the draw operations.

Did find this quote from Opera though which probably explains their stance: http://my.opera.com/...-acceleration-2

Quote

Our hardware acceleration is a bit different from what other browsers have implemented. Most of them do full hardware acceleration of all draw operations, but only on Windows Vista and Windows 7 - dropping to a more limited set of accelerated draw operations on other platforms. Our implementation will feature full acceleration on any OS with sufficient hardware support. This means we can also use fully hardware accelerated draw operations on Windows XP, Linux, Mac OS X and OpenGL ES 2 capable devices such as recent smart-phones and web-enabled TVs.

[cork1958]

Right on, Opera!!

Don't know how they can possibly make it faster, other than what they're explaining here, but bring it on!!

On ANY of my 8 systems, Opera EASILY blows away ANY other browser for speed.