Traditionally, web browsers relied entirely on the CPU to render web page content. With capable GPUs becoming an integral part of even the smallest of devices and with rich media such as video and 3D graphics playing an increasingly important role to the web experience, attention has turned on finding ways to make more effective utilization of the underlying hardware to achieve better performance and power savings. There's clear indication that getting the GPU directly involved with compositing the contents of a web page can result in very significant speedups. The largest gains are to be had from eliminating unecessary (and very slow) copies of large data, especially copies from video memory to system memory. The most obvious candidates for such optimizations are the <video> element and the WebGL canvas, both of which can generate their results in areas of memory that that CPU doesn't have fast access to.

Delegating compositing of the page layers to the GPU provides other benefits as well. In most cases, the GPU can achieve far better efficiency than the CPU (both in terms of speed and power draw) in drawing and compositing operations that involve large numbers of pixels as the hardware is designed specifically for these types of workloads.



Read about it here: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium....ting-in-chrome

Chromium Gets GPU Acceleration, Chrome Next



Continue to read here: http://www.ghacks.net/2010/08/29/chr...n-chrome-next/

IE9 also claims to offer GPU acceleration but will work only on Vista or Win 7. It would be interesting to see what OS Chrome/Chromium specify. Although, there's one mention that it does work on Win XP. If that is true, it will be one up for Chrome!

And here's a link to a video.

Here's some gossip about IE versus FF. No mention of Chrome in this article...
http://www.conceivablytech.com/2702/...-acceleration/

'm surprised Microsoft has been prepared to just hand XP users over to Firefox and Chrome (all those not captive to IE6, at least).

More