Safari - GPU acceleration

Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
I've heard of the new additions that will be in Safari 5.1 such as framework level task separation, but when will Safari get GPU acceleration? All shipping macs have capable GPU's. Anyone hear anything? Seems every other browser has a beta out that supports it, but no word from Safari.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 11
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    Safari has it, they also added it for Windows later on:



    http://www.apple.com/safari/whats-new.html



    "Hardware Acceleration for Windows

    Tap into the graphics processing power of your PC while browsing the web. Safari 5 adds hardware acceleration support for Windows, so rich media and interactive graphics execute smoothly and speedily in the browser."
  • Reply 2 of 11
    tipootipoo Posts: 1,141member
    Wow, not sure how I missed that. So I guess its actually the first stable release with GPU acceleration? And on Windows too? Thats a shock. Although I'd still avoid it on Windows, on OSX its decent.
  • Reply 3 of 11
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by tipoo View Post


    Wow, not sure how I missed that. So I guess its actually the first stable release with GPU acceleration? And on Windows too? Thats a shock. Although I'd still avoid it on Windows, on OSX its decent.



    I think version 4 had it. Apple mention the requirements for viewing their modern content as version 4 or 5. For movies, Quicktime itself is hardware-accelerated for H264 ever since 10.6 launched and their HTML 5 Canvas always has been hardware-accelerated.



    The Windows version has never been up to the same standard but they don't deserve it . Let them have Chrome instead.
  • Reply 4 of 11
    tipootipoo Posts: 1,141member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post


    I think version 4 had it. Apple mention the requirements for viewing their modern content as version 4 or 5. For movies, Quicktime itself is hardware-accelerated for H264 ever since 10.6 launched and their HTML 5 Canvas always has been hardware-accelerated.



    Yeah, but is compositing elements within the browser itself GPU accelerated? Video acceleration within a container is a different matter.



    For example with FF4 even fonts are done with GPU acceleration through Directwrite on the Windows front.
  • Reply 5 of 11
    asherianasherian Posts: 144member
    No, it's not.



    Safari 4+ is HW accelerated in the same way Firefox 3+ was -- it used some HW acceleration for things like text and image decompression. It is not at all the same kind of acceleration (GPU compositing) in Firefox 4, Chrome 10+, and IE9.
  • Reply 6 of 11
    tipootipoo Posts: 1,141member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Asherian View Post


    No, it's not.



    Safari 4+ is HW accelerated in the same way Firefox 3+ was -- it used some HW acceleration for things like text and image decompression. It is not at all the same kind of acceleration (GPU compositing) in Firefox 4, Chrome 10+, and IE9.





    Thats what I thought, so any idea when Safari will get full GPU acceleration equivalent to the new browsers?
  • Reply 7 of 11
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by tipoo View Post


    Yeah, but is compositing elements within the browser itself GPU accelerated? Video acceleration within a container is a different matter.



    For example with FF4 even fonts are done with GPU acceleration through Directwrite on the Windows front.



    Apple's Quartz composer is hardware accelerated and Core Text works with it. I would have expected some level of hardware compositing and I'm sure people have reported graphics glitches with GPUs while viewing web pages, which suggests the GPU is rendering some of the web content, although it may just be the result of the CPU composition.



    If they aren't compositing HTML content on the GPU, they definitely do with video and HTML 5 Canvas, which is where you notice hardware acceleration most. They do need to optimise some things though because you can see the fishIE test on this page runs very slowly and that is a canvas element:



    http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Vi...p/Default.html
  • Reply 8 of 11
    tipootipoo Posts: 1,141member
    ^Thats part of why I figured they weren't using it in the same sense other browsers are. FF4 and Chrome Beta (after changing about:flags) do pretty good at the fish tank test, Safari works like FF3 or another non-accelerated browser.
  • Reply 9 of 11
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by tipoo View Post


    ^Thats part of why I figured they weren't using it in the same sense other browsers are. FF4 and Chrome Beta (after changing about:flags) do pretty good at the fish tank test, Safari works like FF3 or another non-accelerated browser.



    It's not a clean-cut 'accelerated' or 'non-accelerated' though. Safari is clearly hardware accelerating some things. If you launch some of the Chrome Experiments like Ball Pool:



    http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/ball-pool/?f=



    it's very smooth and anti-aliased. It may be that those are all vector renderings and the slow rendering like fishIE uses image content.



    Microsoft have clearly built the tests to show up the areas where Apple's rendering is lacking:



    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6LrQqzkW-M
  • Reply 10 of 11
    tipootipoo Posts: 1,141member
    But that worked perfectly in every GPU accelerated browser I have (hint: I have all of them )



    This just tells me that the other browsers have what Safari has, plus more. In other words, Safari is still missing something, its GPU acceleration is less complete than the others.



    Again, since every mac is shipping with a GPU capable of this, and since Safari 5.1 in Lion makes no mention of it either, I think they are falling behind there. Hard to draw another conclusion. IE9 is launching this March with possibly the most mature GPU acceleration engine of them all, will they actually beat Apple to the punch? This world is flipping on its head
  • Reply 11 of 11
    tipootipoo Posts: 1,141member
    http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/rev...9-reviewed.ars



    Explains a bit about why this type of GPU acceleration is different than the limited use Safari puts it to.



    Still no news on Safari GPU acceleration?



    Safari 5.1 on Lion does look nice though, with the new multitouch back/forward interface.
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