HardwareAcceleration
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Quake ported to the Pre, webOS 3D gaming truly within reach
Yeah, hardware accelerating Doom is an important milestone in any fledgling system's career, but when you talk 3D acceleration, Quake is certainly a giant leap ahead of Doom in polygonal terms. The game has now been ported to webOS using the same new SDL library from version 1.3.5, and while it looks a little sluggish and crashy in the video after the break, it's clearly a landmark event just the same. Now if only we could get stuff like this in the App Catalog we'd be perfectly happy forever and ever. Or for at least a week.
Programmer adds IE 9 graphics acceleration to Firefox
Not so fast, Internet Explorer! We know that you have great things in the works for IE 9 -- including Direct2D GPU acceleration, the 2D / vector graphics API that we first laid eyes on in Windows 7. And believe us, that got our attention -- as well as the attention of Mozilla programmer Bas Schouten. It seems that over the weekend, the young man successfully loaded Direct2D support into an alpha build of Firefox 3.7 -- just days after you announced its inclusion in the next version of your web browser. "Things are looking very promising for Direct2D" and Firefox, said Schouten, although "older PCs with pre-D3D10 graphics cards and WDDM 1.0 drivers will not show significant improvements." And we thought that accelerometer support was wild!
Internet Explorer 9 to sport GPU acceleration and HTML5 support
Even if you don't have a favored fighter in the browser wars, you have to admit Microsoft's Internet Explorer has been looking mighty unfit over the last few years. Younger and fitter contenders like Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome have arguably overtaken the old stalwart, and now Microsoft is making some much-needed noise about fighting back. The software giant has been giving developers and curious journalists a very early peek into its IE 9 progress at PDC, with its stated ambitions including faster Javascript (see table above), HTML5 support, and hardware acceleration for web content. By harnessing DirectX and your graphics processor, the new browser will offer improvements in text readability and video performance, as well as taking some of the load off the CPU. Development has only just got under way, mind you, so there's still plenty of time to screw it all up. Or make it awesome.
Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 betas are out, multi-touch and video acceleration are in (video)
Here we go: Adobe just made its Flash 10.1 prerelease packages available for download in fulfillment of its Open Screen promise. The download is available for Windows, Intel-based Mac, and Linux systems with a smartphone version coming later; notably, while no other mobile OS is specifically mentioned, Adobe says that a beta for Palm webOS is slated for "later this year" on its Flash Player 10.1 page. At the moment, however, only the Windows release includes hardware-based video acceleration for H.264 video. And this is beta-ware kids, so there's more than the usual level of hazard with installing. Then again, for those of you with Atom-based netbooks brought to their knees by full-screen HD video, well, the benefits likely outweigh the risk for you. Adobe also announced an AIR 2 beta which allows developers to build more feature-rich applications including multi-touch capabilities -- see the unholy union demonstrated on an HP TouchSmart in the video after the break. Update: As noted by reader ZeroK2 in the comments, the release notes [warning: PDF] specify which GPUs will benefit from the hardware acceleration. These include ATI Radeon HD 3xxx and 4xxx series, Mobile Radeon HD 4xxx series, select FirePro products, Intel 4 series chipsets, the Broadcom Crystal HD decoder, and most NVIDIA ION and GeForce 8/9/1xx/2xx powered PCs. In other words, the vast majority of netbook owners with integrated GMA950 graphics need not apply. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Silverlight 3 out of beta, joins forces with your GPU for HD streaming
A day earlier than expected, Microsoft has launched its third edition of Silverlight and its SDK. As Ars Technica notes, some of the bigger improvements on the user side are GPU hardware acceleration and new codec support including H.264, AAC, and MPEG-4. If you're looking to give it a spin, there's a Smooth Streaming demo available that, as the name suggests, does a pretty good job of streaming HD video with little stutter, even when skipping around. If you've got Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 6, Safari 3 or anything fresher, hit up the read link to get the update.[Via Ars Technica]Read - Download PageRead - Smooth Streaming demo
