Chrome to get hardware acceleration

 

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By Nicole Kobie

Posted on 31 Aug 2010 at 09:29

Google will add hardware acceleration support to its Chrome browser, following the lead of rival developers.

Hardware acceleration offloads heavy work to the graphics processor in order to speed up the display of video, 3D and other data-intensive images.

After arriving in Apple Safari earlier this year, and due to arrive in Mozilla's Firefox 4 and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9, support for such a system has now arrived in the latest build of Chromium, the open-source project that underpins Chrome.

"A web page can naturally be divided into a number of more or less independent layers," software engineer Vangelis Kokkevis explained in a post on the Chromium blog. "Layers can contain text styled with CSS, images, videos, and WebGL or 2D canvases.

At the moment, not all work in Chromium can be offloaded to the GPU. "Currently, most of the common layer contents, including text and images, are still rendered on the CPU and are simply handed off to the compositor for the final display," said Kokkevis.

"Other layers use the GPU to accelerate needed operations that touch a lot of pixels," he added. "Video layers, for example, can now do colour conversion and scaling in a shader on the GPU. Finally, there are some layers that can be fully rendered on the GPU, such as those containing WebGL elements."

Sandbox hurdles

Because Chrome is sandboxed on computers for security reasons, making use of the GPU means Chromium developers must jump an extra hurdle than their rivals at Microsoft or Mozilla, and had to create a new GPU process that runs in a modified sandbox, keeping the browser separate from the PC while still allowing some access.

"Creating a specialised process like this allows Chromium’s sandbox to continue to contain as much as possible: the renderer process is still unable to access the system’s graphics APIs, and the GPU process contains less logic," said Kokkevis.

The Chromium system doesn't yet use hardware acceleration as much as its rivals, but developers are working to expand its use, Kokkevis added. "Over time, we’re looking into moving even more of the rendering from the CPU to the GPU to achieve impressive speed-ups."

The hardware acceleration support is listed in a Chromium 7 build, so doesn't look likely to arrive in Chrome 6, which is due soon.

Download the latest version of Google Chrome here