GPU

For a new chapter in my ongoing series of talks and articles about browser performance I wanted to examine how key user experience metrics like page load time are dependent on available hardware resources. I prepared a VM and started my tests with a single CPU core and 2 GB of RAM, planning to gradually add more cores, more RAM and, eventually, a GPU. As it turned out, the latter is harder than anticipated.

Web video is ubiquitous. We take it for granted that browsers play video in high resolution, over any connection, on any device. Behind the scenes, a complex machinery of video formats, codecs, and GPU acceleration techniques is at work to make it all happen. This post explains what is what.

GPU acceleration is en vogue. After slowly but steadily moving out of the 3D niche it has arrived in the mainstream. Today, applications like Microsoft Office leverage the GPU, but even more so do web browsers. Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer all have hardware acceleration turned on by default. People generally seem to be happy about that - GPUs are super-efficient, the more work they do the fewer remains for the CPU, overall energy consumption is reduced and battery life increases. Or so the myth goes. Interestingly, facts to prove that are hard to find. Nobody seems to have measured how GPU acceleration affects CPU usage. Let’s change that.

For a geek, one of the most fun things is choosing a new toy. I experienced this once again when I needed to buy a new laptop computer. The selection process was a lengthy one, during which I looked at and considered practically every model on the market. The benefits of that are twofold: I get a new device, whose strengths I appreciate and whose weaknesses I accept because I know there is no other model better suited for my needs on the market. You get this: a very personal laptop computer buyer’s guide.