Is firefox 3 could accelerated by GPU now ？

taizitju · Post by **taizitju** » June 27th, 2008, 7:18 am

Some articles said that firefox 3 can use opengl to hardware 2d accelerate.
Is that true? I wonder.

Give me some further information， please.

Post by **LIMPET235** » June 27th, 2008, 7:39 am

taizitju,
Hi. Would you please remove the image in your sig.
It's against Forum Rules. Thank you.

taizitju · Post by **taizitju** » June 27th, 2008, 7:42 am

LIMPET235 wrote:taizitju,
Hi. Would you please remove the image in your sig.
It's against Forum Rules. Thank you.

Sorry !
OK now

Post by **LIMPET235** » June 27th, 2008, 7:45 am

NP. Thanks heaps.

Helico · Post by **Helico** » June 27th, 2008, 3:50 pm

I thought that Firefox 3's Cairo engine automatically uses GPU acceleration, and that there was no way to turn it off and have it not do so. I am curious though if the answer is different.

Post by **trolly** » June 27th, 2008, 3:55 pm

About cairo: http://www.cairographics.org/

taizitju · Post by **taizitju** » June 27th, 2008, 6:57 pm

....I just want to know. how it works, and what accelerate can cairo do.

Luc VN · Post by **Luc VN** » June 28th, 2008, 2:35 am

The original question has not been answered...

taizitju wrote: "Some articles said that firefox 3 can use opengl to hardware 2d accelerate. Is that true? I wonder."

A simple Yes or No would do

Post by **trolly** » June 28th, 2008, 4:30 am

For that you have to look into the cairo code. The main page says "cairo uses acceleration when possible".

Cairo is designed to produce consistent output on all output media while taking advantage of display hardware acceleration when available (eg. through the X Render Extension).

Amn · Post by **Amn** » July 10th, 2008, 1:59 pm

I am pretty sure it does NOT accelerate, at least on Windows XP. I have not looked into the code, so take my words with a grain of salt, however, I am assuming that under XP Cairo uses win32 GDI backend, a path you cannot be sure about, except the fact that GDI32 has long proven to be an old software-only library. Starting with Vista, it uses the WPF - Windows Presentation Foundation, the very critical thing that replaces GDI32 due to the latter showing its age - being a hardware-independent and as a result hardware-unassisted interface. Win32 GDI is the actual method of producing graphics output for desktop applications for Windows since Windows 1.0. So it is safe to say that since Cairo sits on top of Win32 GDI, it is a software only method under the circumstances.

Cairo does not mention DirectX as a backend, and I am not sure whether anyone did manage to successfully use Glitz on Windows, let alone plug it as a backend into Cairo to drive Firefox. The latter is not possible as far as I understood, in fact Mozilla folks consider removing Glitz support from Firefox altogether, despite the fact that the very engine they use - Cairo - allows for it. I am a software developer, yet I do not applaud this decision. Let the interfacing flow.

Anyone know why they remove Glitz support?