Mozilla's Servo Gets A Experimental Renderer To Draw On The GPU

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mozilla's Servo Gets A Experimental Renderer To Draw On The GPU

Mozilla's next-generation, Rust-written Servo web layout engine now has an experimental renderer for drawing web content on the GPU. The Servo WebRender aims to do all the rasterization work on the graphics processor and the initial results are promising...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Servo-WebRender-GPU

[schmidtbag]

In my opinion, they should have designed this with the intention of GPU acceleration from the very beginning. We're not in the 90s anymore - the average GPU can and should be handling page rendering. Of course, there are a handful of modern devices that don't have GPU acceleration, but the current firefox tends to run somewhat slow on those too.

[gufide]

Well, looking at the numbers, the project is already doing great.
With Vulkan it will be even better, I can't wait to have a Servo browser so I can finally ditch chrome!

[uid313]

Is GPU acceleration really needed for the web?

We got insane fast CPUs anyway.

[rudregues]

Arch Linux AUR repos has servo-git. I really liked the proposal and I'm installing it right now to test and see how it compares to default firefox (gecko engine).

[Pajn]

Is GPU acceleration really needed for the web?

We got insane fast CPUs anyway.

Rust and servo makes it possible to hugely palletize much of the rendering pipeline which is why it's faster that current browser engines, however GPUs are much better at that kind of work flows than the CPUs so that should gain even more speed.

[bug77]

For all its upsides, Servo is still being developed targeting OpenGL and not Vulkan. For Windows, it only says it's targeting Direct3D, but it's unlikely they're going after Direct3D 12. These may come later, but the engine itself already isn't targeting the latest and greatest from the beginning.

[mark45]

Is GPU acceleration really needed for the web?

We got insane fast CPUs anyway.

Yes, even a single animated GIF on a webpage constantly triggers the whole page to be rendered which is a lot of CPU work that is GPU's job to do.
And no, CPU's aren't insanely fast, not when it comes to doing the rendering. The GPUs are.

[carewolf]

Yes, even a single animated GIF on a webpage constantly triggers the whole page to be rendered which is a lot of CPU work that is GPU's job to do.
And no, CPU's aren't insanely fast, not when it comes to doing the rendering. The GPUs are.

No it doesn't, Web Engine developers are not idiots. The classic non accelerated way of rendering is marking things dirty and then repainting the dirty parts. The modern way is rendering with CPU into tiles and then compositing tiles with the GPU.

[andreano]

We got insane fast CPUs anyway.

If you mean per-core performance, then absolutely! But (if we extrapolate) your next desktop PC will have a 0.001GHz 1024-core CPU, recycled from a mobile phone.

Parallelization (GPU or CPU) seems the only way to keep Moore's law alive for some more years, until the next quantum leap. The gigahertz race is over, and soon the nanometer race too. There will be sacrifices in per-core performance in the name of power efficiency and core count.