Chromium to get GPU acceleration

Google's Chromium browser for Linux systems will support GPU acceleration, bringing it in line with rivals such as Microsoft's IE9 and Mozilla's Firefox 4.

In a blog post on Friday, Google software engineer Vangelis Kokkevis said the move would let Chromium "speed up its entire drawing model, including many common 2D operations such as compositing and image scaling".

"At its core, this graphics work relies on a new process (yes, another one) called the GPU process," Kokkevis wrote. "The GPU process accepts graphics commands from the renderer process and pushes them to OpenGL or Direct3D (via ANGLE). Normally, renderer processes wouldn’t be able to access these APIs, so the GPU process runs in a modified sandbox."

"Creating a specialized process like this allows Chromium’s sandbox to continue to contain as much as possible: the renderer process is still unable to access the system’s graphics APIs, and the GPU process contains less logic."

The Chromium team has posted a design document to fully outline its accelerated compositing system. According to Kokkevis, the team will over time move even more rendering across from the CPU to the GPU.