By Wolfgang Gruener
With the release of the first versions of Chrome 7, we noticed a subtle speed increase in graphics-heavy websites and suggested that Google is improving Chrome’s overall graphics performance. Our readers later found that GPU acceleration can already be manually activated in Chrome. Google has now officially confirmed that “there’s been a lot of work going on to overhaul Chromium’s graphics system” and that the browser will “begin to take advantage of the GPU to speed up its entire drawing model.”

It is the feature that Microsoft has been promoting for several months for its upcoming IE9 beta and a feature that is about to be activated in Firefox 4 Beta (5) early next month. Browser are beginning to take advantage of the multithreading capabilities of graphics processors to speed up their 2D and 3D performance. Google said that the functionality has been integrated in the “tip-of-tree Chromium” lately and the team “figured it was time for a primer.” Google says that it will be using the GPU to “speed up its entire drawing model, including many common 2D operations such as compositing and image scaling.”

The foundation of the GPU acceleration in Chrome is a new (modified) sandbox process called the GPU process. Via this process, Chrome can take graphics commands from the renderer process and send them to OpenGL or Direct3D. This approach enabled Google to separate the rendering of a web page into different independent layers, such as CSS, images, videos, and WebGL or 2D canvases.

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