Direct2D/DirectWrite Accelerated Rendering For Firefox

[a;skdjfajf;ak]

Q: does direct2d work on the asus 1005ha?

i have it installed it now (and enabled the about:config things) but can't really see any difference on the numerous tests i came across.
if somebody knows whether it is supported, or any tests that will show for sure whether it works or not, please let me know

See page 1 of this thread for test pages. This one is the most dramatic and visible of the tests, clearly a big change with dw/d2d on:

http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/balloon.svg

[Omega X]

Anyone try the map zoom demo on the IE9 page? It seems that Minefield does a better job at that zooming than IE9 Preview once the images are loaded.

[trieste]

Users with DX9 cards will have software, or minimal hardware, acceleration with DirectWrite on. The balloon svg is slow as ever with DW on, but I know that DW is on because of the recently resolved high DPI bug.

[Omega X]

People with DX9 cards will be accelerated through the DX9 backend for Layers whenever Bas gets to coding it. But that's on XP.

Right now he's doing a DX10 backend that is supposed to fill in the gaps. That includes DX9 cards through DX10-level-9 emulation that Vista and Seven use. Where D2D fails for some, DX10-level-9 will most likely pick up the slack.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=546514

[MASTAN]

Q: does direct2d work on the asus 1005ha?

i have it installed it now (and enabled the about:config things) but can't really see any difference on the numerous tests i came across.
if somebody knows whether it is supported, or any tests that will show for sure whether it works or not, please let me know

viewtopic.php?p=8864085#p8864085

baloon and other svg tests cannot guarantee D2D is working on slow videocards. You need image quality test to know for sure(see link above).
For example, I've tested some of them on netbook Acer 751h, which has pretty slow DX9 graphics card GMA500, and there was no perceptible difference in speed. And D2D definitely works there because of image quality difference.

[_Dexter_]

One more time to see if anyone has problems with scrolling and losing separator lines in the menus.

First of all I think I narrowed both problems down to d2d/dw. When they are disabled I don't seem to have a problem. If any of you guys can give this a try to see if you get what I get at least I'll know I'm not alone. Misery loves company as they say. Use the latest 3.7a4pre if you can.

1. Enable d2d/dw.
2. Enable smooth scrolling via Options|Advanced|General.
3. Run in a maximized window. This is not Full screen mode in FF. It's the normal windows maximize.
4. Run under Windows 7. I use 64, but 32 will do I guess.
5. Preferably have an nvidia card with the latest drivers.

Now go along your merry way and surf the net. At some point in time I'm hoping you will find that scrolling becomes somewhat jerky on a site. Sort of like you turned smooth scrolling off. It won't stay this way and you can correct it by doing various mundane things like just keep scrolling until it might correct itself. Also, there should be a point that you lose some separators in you menus. The two don't necessarily go hand in hand.

A couple of points. It seems that running in a non-maximized window at least lessens these problems if not getting rid of them totally. Also, when the problem arises in maximized mode you usually can fix both problems by unmaximizing the window. You can return to maximized again, but the problem will come back eventually on any given site. These problems are random but always happen to me. Give it some time.

Oh, one more thing. Do you find that after an update, adding/deleting an addon, and some other actions you have to restart FF twice otherwise d2d/dw gets disabled somehow?

btw... I still have these problems with a new profile and nothing but what comes with the initial install of Minefield.


Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.3a4pre) Gecko/20100324 Minefield/3.7a4pre - Build ID: 20100324140059

[dhouwn]

Happened to me already twice: Suddenly, everything white, the contents of every Firefox window, everything but the title bar and the window border, resizing does not help. I can still click things and work normally though (but with the handicap of having to work blindly).
I know that my graphics driver is sometimes crashing (LiveKernelEvent 117, which would probably be a BSOD under XP). Could it be that the thread for the graphical stuff is unable to recover after such occurrences? I couldn't find any Bugzilla entry to this and I don't want to create one unless I can find a way of creating a reproducible test case (killing the 'dwn.exe' process does not lead to this state).

[Ver Greeneyes]

(killing the 'dwn.exe' process does not lead to this state).

Doesn't the dwm.exe process restart itself if you just close it? I think you have to stop the service (Desktop Windows Manager) in order to truly stop it. Unless you simply meant that killing the process doesn't lead directly to the problems described.

[backdoor.trojan]

There's a Problem with DirectWrite and the new Aero Feature in Minefield! If you go with the Cursor on Buttons or if you close Tabs, the images still stay there until you make the Window smaller or bigger... That doesnt look really good, i hope there will be a solution soon. I like aero but i like DirectWrite more... Can i turn off Aero anywhere in about:config or have i wait for the update which will fix the bug?

[Tss]

... Can i turn off Aero anywhere in about:config...

You can use a Persona or use

Code: Select all

#navigator-toolbox, #main-window{-moz-appearance: toolbox !important;}

in Stylish or userchrome.css to turn Aero off.

[Duke D]

Does the Stylish-D2D incompatibility still exist or is there a workaround?

[iceccold]

When I installed new drivers for Nvidia I get rendering mess again (shown in pictures on 5th page) .
Does anybody know why this is happening?

[_Dexter_]

Have you guys tried running a basic windows theme instead of an Aero theme? It works wonders when used with d2d/dw. All you lose is the glass affect which IMO is no big deal. Plus running without Aero speeds up Windows in general.

In my case I had all kinds of anomalies running with Aero, d2d/dw. The new textarea resizer never showed as it should under Aero. Now it does. Visual artifacts are gone and many other things.

So unless you are dead set on glass give a basic theme a shot and see if it doesn't 'cure' a lot of things.

[wellofsouls]

I'm not sure if anyone has reported this bug yet, after I enable the D2D and DW, most of the time when I navigate from one page to another page, the page content shown just doesn't change. For example if I'm on http://www.bing.com, and I go to http://www.google.com, the content window still displays the bing page, despite it has finished loading the google page and the page title has changed to google.

Only after I switch to another app and then switch back, the content windows somehow "snaps" and shows the correct page content.

This doesn't happen every time, but about 70% of the time. I have tried it on different systems with different ATI and nVidia cards, and this happens with all the different systems, so I doubt it's something with the driver and graphics card. Both 32-bit and 64-bit Vista too.

Any idea what caused this problem?

[Omega X]

Plus running without Aero speeds up Windows in general.

IT depends on the machine. Aero doesn't heavily impact performance on a machine that is capable of running it properly. Turning it off for those machines is only placebo since its not animating anything anymore.