On Feb 19, 2010, at 7:20 PM, Leo Meyerovich wrote:
We've been experimenting in our model with various modes of parallel
2D rendering (basic theme: GPU/SMP support rocks) but have a more
wide open design space than WebKit's.
For a not-too-painful approach, looks like Firefox is doing well,
and that's even for D2D (not retained mode): check out the last few
posts @ http://www.basschouten.com/ . Flash does a bunch as well,
but that's less obviously transferred.
Parallelism can be used at multiple levels within the renderer --
SIMD, threads, and/or GPU -- I was actually under the impression
that WebKit on the iPhone already uses hardware acceleration for
painting. For the latter case, the hardware was made for pushing
pixels, so the performance question should be of how much of a
speedup, not whether there is one.
iPhone uses hardware acceleration for compositing and scrolling, not
for painting per se. It also does most Web content processing on a
separate thread from the UI thread, but that is for UI responsiveness,
not painting throughput.
- Leo
[[ A little further out, I've been going over the CSS spec, and
found that a lot of the CSS transform stuff maps nicely into OpenGL
as it doesn't impact layout; structured extensions like adding
shaders to CSS surfaces doesn't sound too crazy at this point. This
seems well-beyond the scope of this list, however. ]]
CSS transitions and transforms were designed to support being done in
hardware. WebKit supports using hardware acceleration for animation
and compositing (currently only really working for the Mac port).
Using graphics APIs that send more work to the GPU (OpenGL, OpenVG,
Direct2D, etc) is definitely a possibility and should not impact
anything above the GraphicsContext layer. That's a different kid of
change than dispatching individual drawing commands to a background
thread though.
Regards,
Maciej
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