Which Hardware Acceleration Options Have Been Enabled?

Firefox iv: hardware acceleration

Editor's annotation: If you've arrived here via the Mozilla Support site because y'all are exploring advanced settings or having frequent crashes at startup, this probably isn't the correct solution. Information technology's been a few years since Firefox 4 was released and this mail was written. Yous might want to visit this Troubleshooting page instead.

What is hardware acceleration?

"Hardware acceleration" is basically using the GPU when it's possible (instead of the CPU). This makes page-cartoon operations faster.

There's ii different levels of acceleration going on:

• Content acceleration speeds upward rendering the actual page content, such every bit the text, images, CSS borders, etc. Content acceleration is as well used to speed up the 2D HTML sail. On Windows Vista/seven, we use Direct2D for this and it has been activated in this new beta.
• Compositing acceleration speeds up putting together chunks of already-rendered content (layers) together for final display in the window, potentially applying effects such as transforms along the manner. For instance, if you had a HTML5 video that was playing, and it had CSS effects practical to it that was making it rotate and fade in and out, that would exist using compositing acceleration to make that go fast. (This feature is not activated by default still.)

>> Run the test yourself: Hardware Acceleration Stress Test. <<
Credits for the photos: Paul (dex).

Hardware Acceleration by operating system:

These optimizations are available only if you have compatible hardware and the associated drivers.

Operation	Linux	Windows XP	Windows Vista/7	Mac OS 10
Content	XRender	None	Direct2D	Quartzane
Compositing	OpenGL	Directly 3D	Direct 3D	OpenGL

[i]: Quartz is basically CPU-only. QuartzGL (GPU acceleration for the Quartz 2nd API) is not activated in Firefox for now (nor in other browsers).

Important note: Don't confuse hardware dispatch with WebGL. WebGL is an OpenGL-similar API for Javascript to draw 3D objects into a <canvass> element. Obviously, WebGL is itself hardware accelerated since it uses OpenGL (or Direct3D through ANGLE on Windows if no OpenGL drivers are present).

We need assistance!

Assistance us to improve hardware acceleration in Firefox: Install the Grafx Bot extension (details here and addition here).

Firefox'due south hardware acceleration interacts with a machine's graphics hardware via DirectX or OpenGL, depending on platform. These interactions tend to be very sensitive to the graphics environment on the system (east.chiliad., the specific video bill of fare(s) on the organization, how much VRAM is available, the version of the video driver, the OS version, etc). In fact, there are so many permutations of the relevant factors that we can't exam them all internally.

Grafx Bot runs a suite of automated tests on your machine that exercises interesting aspects of hardware acceleration (for about v to 20 minutes). At the end of the tests, you tin send your results to Mozilla (with bearding video configuration data), where the data will be nerveless and analyzed, and hopefully lead to bug fixes and more than reliable code for hardware dispatch than we'd otherwise have.

We demand help from the community, and so we can become exposure on every bit many unique hardware environments every bit possible.

Paul is a Firefox developer.

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