HW acceleration in browsers

I am curious: what users want from HW acceleration in browsers?
Is there difference in web page image quality with 'On' and 'Off'?
Is there difference in web page rendering performance with 'On' and 'Off'?

I see only one benefit from HW (GPU) acceleration - on heavy CPU load it can provide more smooth/snappy experience.

 

With my experience with Firefox Hardware Acceleration, sometimes it's better left off because it can lead to stability issues (especially in combination with drivers after 314.22). More so the case on Linux distros too (depending on what you're using for a driver).

That's pretty much the way I always saw it. Newer CPUs (anything released in the last 8 years even) are probably fast enough where any GPU acceleration wouldn't be noticeable. But if you don't have any issues having it enabled, it doesn't hurt to have it.

 

Namely constant comments about having troubles with HW acceleration in browsers drive me to ask a question. And most of those comments are pretty emotional which I would understand in the case of games failures. But browsers... May be I just don`t know something important?...

 

Not an expert on HW acc, but here you go.
http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/gpu-accelerated-compositing-in-chrome

 

run http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/FishBowl/Default.html

with HD aceleration on and off and view the diference

 

quality is = both only diference is speed

 

[IE 10]
With HW acceleration Off: 500 fishes ~ 50 FPS, below 500 fishes - 60 FPS.
With HW acceleration On: up to 2000 fishes ~ 60 FPS.

Quite a difference in numbers, but I see no difference in movements of 500 fishes with HW accel Off and of 2000 fishes with HW accel On. Another 'but' - it is HTML5. Will be that big difference on plane mostly textual web page?

Anyway, thanks for links.

[Opera 16]
With HW acceleration Off: 10 fishes ~ 18 FPS.
With HW acceleration On: up to 2000 fishes ~ 60 FPS.
:thumbdown

 

Yup, it will be difference, but you will know it only when you are scrolling with smoothscroll.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smoothscroll/cccpiddacjljmfbbgeimpelpndgpoknn

 

I get 60 FPS with and without hardware acceleration in both Firefox and IE11?

 

With 2000 fishes?

 

You got IE 11 with Win8 or you installed it on Win7?

 

Running Windows 8.1 - and yeah, 2000 fishes.

 

I use smooth scrolling addons. and they dont work very well with out hardware acceleration



chrome in windows 8 seems to have better scrolling then in windows 7.

flick of the mouse wheel and page flys.


in windows 7 I get stuttering in scrolling with the addon when doing this.


firefox , scrolling sucks.. not matter what I get stuttering when scrolling.

 

Try auto and see how many amount of fish you can reach before the FPS drop from 60 FPS, with and without HW Acc.

Because your CPU are too strong for 2000 fish, hw acc is to reduce the works need to done on the CPU, most people will facing CPU bound, not GPU bound.

Yup, because until now, Firefox don't support the rendering and compositing thread etc off-main-thread.(except Firefox Metro, you can testing it with Nightly)

https://benoitgirard.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/off-main-thread-compositing-omtc-and-why-it-matters/

 

I turned it off on my Firefox since I started using FXAA.

But I stopped using it (doesn't go well with 3D displays).

And now, I re-enabled it... And the only thing I see is that everything (fonts, etc) are somewhat filtered (bilinear/trilinear filtering).

 

can this thing be turned off in chrome? I don't like my card sitting and heating up in 3D mode while I read the damn news...I got HW accel. disabled but gfx still goes in 3D mode. I'd like to stay in 2D mode.
Any solutions?

edit: nwm, found solution here: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/271264-chrome-gpu-hardware-acceleration-turn-off.html

 

Haha, quite an interesting program to test on.

HW Acceleration on = 3920 fish (auto)
HW Acceleration off = 3890 fish (auto)

Would hover around one of these two values depending on HW Acc setting.

Using Firefox Beta 25.0

 

Movement should be static in those test .there was no + randomness of movement last I check(wouldn't want to render prefetch and super fetch useless(ROFL)

 

[IE 10 @ Win7]
HW Acceleration on = 2345 fish (auto)
HW Acceleration off = 450 fish (auto)

Edit:

Are you sure browser was restarted after switching HW accel?

 

test with this version

http://code.google.com/p/lawlietfox/downloads/detail?name=lawlietfox-22-2-win64-intel64.7z&can=2&q=

is a more faster version of firefox 25% more faster and using x64