@Loverock... Sorry, with 188 comments, this is the only place to be at the top.
As always this is a matter of taste, but the problem remains that the argument MS states for this being Win7/Vista-only from a developer point of view... sucks big time. Hardware accelerated graphics have been back ported to practically every OS until now. Why? Because acceleration is by nature multi-platform oriented. Your NVIDIA GPU has nothing to do with my Radeon ATI, nor would have anything to do with Intel's Slim Shady [pun intended]. They just sent DirectX queries that get translated by the API wrapper.
Since the days SGI invented (Open)GL they switched about 8 times the rendering engine without actual changes to the code. Even a plain old Nintendo 64 could do full polygon smooth render on a sub 1GHz system.
So don't tell me you can't back port DirectX to XP just because it uses the Windows Display Driver Model. So then my question. Which engine is required for IE9? D3D-9, D3D-10 or D3D-11. If so, if I have a different model, would it render as Ed's machine? Would it fail? And if I have Windows Server 2008 [I need that one to test my web pages] would it use hardware acceleration or not, since servers rarely have GPUs or use them for SSL.
What about CUDA? Do you support that? Will a CUDA [for computation, not for 3D stuff] optimized Firefox leave IE9 in the dust on the rendering part [since most HTML5 renders are flat and based on raw computer power]? Is Firefox at an advantage, being able to furnish platform optimized versions direct version (not even OpenGL) versus an all encompassing Direct X implementation.
Makes me wonder how real the edge is and how long will it be sustained.
Discussion on:
Message 12 of 1
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