Firefox 4 Hardware Acceleration

[Lamron]

The new Firefox 4 is out now and works great. One cool feature it has is hardware acceleration. It basically uses the processor on your graphics card to speed up the browser. It isn't enabled by default, because not all computers/GPUs support it. For me it made a HUGE improvement!

Here's how to enable it:

Go to about:config
gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled = TRUE
mozilla.widget.render-mode = 6

Go to about:support

Check if "GPU Accelerated Windows" at the bottom says 1/1. If not, it may sugest you update your video driver.


===============================================

Couple of before and after tests:

demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/

Before enabling, my CPU was 50% and I was getting about 15fps.
After enabling, my CPU was 20% and I was getting 60+fps.


ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/FishIEtank/

On this one, I can run 500 fish at 60 FPS, and 1000 fish at 40 FPS. Before, it was barely hitting 40 FPS with only 100 fish.

[Major_A]

With all my tabs, sounds like what I need...

[Major_A]

I did not have this setting

mozilla.widget.render-mode = 6

but it still says

GPU Accelerated Windows1/1 Direct3D 9


I did notice that it only loaded a few tabs at a time instead of all of them at once!

before browser fps - 9
after - 12
-------

before
at 20 fish

11-20, but mostly 11

after
it pegged out at 27

In the task manager the cpu usage in ff 3.6 or whatever was 16 when idle
now it blips at 1 and 2, that's nice.


I never did check for new drivers for this card.

edit- yes I did, wonder whats up.

edit edit

ahhhh very important

Right-click, New > Integer
mozilla.widget.render-mode

still didn't help any
6

[Lamron]

Do you use the IETab extention for Firefox? I just tried it again and got poor results until I realized I was actually displaying it with IETab enabled.

[Lamron]

Just noticed this:

Mar 27, 2011 15:28:18 GMT -5 Major_A said:

In the task manager the cpu usage in ff 3.6 or whatever was 16 when idle
now it blips at 1 and 2, that's nice.

Doesn't work in FF 3.6. Upgrade to FF 4.0.

[Major_A]

that was a before and after the upgrade.


whats the IETab?

I used to have an agent switcher, but I took it out.


edit

oh that ie tab looks pretty cool just googled it



disabled a few more add ons
15 fps

fish @ 20
30 fps

disabled all add ons made no difference

[Major_A]

That sure was a short span from FF4 to the FF5 release....during my win reinstall or right before it, it went to 5 so I just went and got 5 again.
Off the top of anyone's head, have the reason for the new version so fast?

[Lamron]

I think they're just numbering things differently. Used to be that bug fixes and improvements got small increments (X.1, X.2, X.3 etc.). And new features got full version number increments. V5 didn't add any new features, just lots of upgrades. So think of it like a v4.5.

This version does seem to be even faster. On the fish demo above, now I can get the max 60FPS with 1000 fish running.