Just when you thought Google’ Chrome web browser is untouchable and light years ahead of its rivals, Microsoft finds that Chrome does not excel in all performance disciplines. Hardware acceleration hands Microsoft a huge advantage at this time. If we believe one of Microsoft’s examples, IE9 can run heavy graphics more than 30 times faster than the latest Chrome browser.

I have been very critical of Microsoft’s inability to reinvent its Internet Explorer web browser for nearly 15 years. However, IE9 has already shown its potential in an early platform preview version, exceeding the JavaScript performance of Mozilla’s current Firefox 3.6.x. In a new example, Microsoft demonstrates what is arguably the most significant innovation in IE in more than a decade. It is the only IE feature introduced in recent history that will have to adopted by all other browser makers.

So, what is it? It’s GPU acceleration. IE9 uses a new rendering engine that takes advantage of your graphics processor to render text and graphics on a page. And since graphics is what many-core GPUs do best, the results are nothing less than stunning. We have tried Microsoft’s Flying Images example, which rotates a certain number of browser logos in your browser screen. IE9PP ran 36 logos at 64 fps and 256 logos at 32 fps on our system with an Intel quad-core processor and a relatively antiquated Nvidia 8000-series graphics card. Google’s Chrome struggled with 36 logos at 2 fps and 100 logos at 1 fps. Firefox did better, at 21 fps for 36 logos and 256 logos at 6 fps.

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You can try to run the test yourself on this page and if you are looking for a more detailed analysis, Microsoft offers a performance analysis tool free of charge.

Microsoft said that IE9 “moves graphics work that has traditionally occurred on the general purpose CPU to faster, more specialized hardware” and that the new JavaScript engine can take “advantage of multiple-processor cores to compile JavaScript into machine code.” The breakthrough news here is that web browser typically have a tough time using software parallelization to take advantage of multi-core processors and the differences in performance are rather subtle today. IE9 is the first browser I am aware of that showcases the dramatic performance acceleration promised by GPU makers. In the Flying Images example, Microsoft found that IE9 still had 80% of the CPU resources available, while other browser overwhelmed the CPU.

Conceivably, with the arrival of HTML5 and much more demanding graphics running in a web browser window, IE9PP is setting a new standard. “It’s clear that HTML5 will enable a new class of applications that were previously not possible through standards based markup, and these applications can’t be limited by the performance of today’s browsers,” Microsoft said in a blog post. “Doing HTML5 right means enabling developers to build web applications that have the performance of desktop applications.”

My hat is off to the IE team.

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