GPU Accelerated Compositing Coming in Google Chrome 7
Google posted a first pre-developer version of Chrome 7 under the Chromium label earlier this week and a few people noticed that you could manually enable GPU acceleration. It looks like Google plans on offloading more and more work onto the GPU in order to ‘achieve impressive speedups’ and you can read more about what they are doing by following the link at the bottom of this news post. If you’d like to download a Chromium build of Chrome 7 for Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux, go here.
Currently Chrome uses a single GPU process per browser instance, serving requests from all the renderer processes and any plugin processes. The GPU process, while single threaded, can multiplex between multiple command buffers, each one of which is associated with its own rendering context.
The GPU process architecture offers several benefits including:
- Security: The bulk of the rendering logic remains in the sandboxed Renderer process.
- Robustness: A GPU process crash (e.g. due to faulty drivers) doesn’t bring down the browser.
- Uniformity: Standardizing on OpenGL ES 2.0 as the rendering API for the browser regardless of the platform allows for a single, easier to maintain codebase across all OS ports of Chrome.
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