The Motorola Atrix was released last year by AT&T and since then it has been one of my favorite Android phones. As a matter of fact, I still use it as my daily phone. Our friends at BriefMobile are reporting that the Android 4.0 ROM for the Atrix now has hardware acceleration which means that apps and graphics will run smoother than usual.

I haven’t had a chance to to play around with the latest ICS ROMs but I am definitely giving this a shot. Atrix 4G devices running on leaked ICS builds now have working front and rear cameras, face unlock and even Google Chrome. This sounds very promising for all of us Atrix owners. Don’t expect this ROM to be flawless, there are still many bugs that need to be addressed. It shouldn’t take long until we see a stable ICS build and let’s not forget to thank our fellow Android developers!

Source:http://www.droidmatters.com/news/motorola-atrix-4g-android-4-0-rom-gains-hardware-acceleration/

Moonlight, the free Mono-based Silverlight clone for Linux, can now use the graphics card hardware to render 3D effects and play back videos. In his announcement of the feature, the chief developer for Mono products, Miguel de Icaza, also points out that Moonlight apparently accelerates all pixel shaders, while Microsoft’s Silverlight only accelerates some of them. The software can reportedly accelerate the rendering of surfaces by pre-caching graphics card contents.

Users interested in trying out the driver can find the code on the GitHub project hosting platform. The driver’s developer, David Reveman, explains the possibilities of the hardware acceleration feature in two YouTube videos. The acceleration allows 29 to 35 frames per second to be rendered both in Linux and Windows, compared with 2 to 9 frames without the driver. When the feature will be integrated into Moonlight is yet unclear.

Source:-http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Hardware-acceleration-for-Moonlight-1141801.html

The official release of Microsoft’s next-gen browser Internet Explorer 9 is still a few months away at the very least, but that’s not stopping the big Em Ess from rolling out new features, as a new pre-release “platform preview” released on Thursday makes amply clear.

Internet Explorer 9 has already vastly expanded IE’s support for evolving, next-gen web standards like HTML5, CSS 3 and WOFF, and users who are already testing the preview clearly feel that it is a major step forward for a browser which has all-too-often been synonymous with clumsy rendering and bad security: Microsoft brags that the beta release has already been downloaded ten million times since its release six weeks ago.

The latest pre-release platform preview bring support for CSS 3’s 2D transforms to the browser, as well as improvements in IE9’s hardware acceleration, font rendering and Javascript technology.

One thing’s for sure about IE9: no matter how you feel about previous Microsoft browsers, the pressure put on IE by the likes of WebKit, Firefox and Chrome has compelled Microsoft to develop their most standardized and well tested browser yet. Let’s hope that IE9 can finally erase the bad taste that IE6 left in everyone’s mouths.

Source:-http://www.geek.com/articles/news/ie9-beta-gets-updated-with-better-hardware-acceleration-javascript-and-css-3-support-20101029/

In case you missed it, earlier this week Mozilla announced that Firefox 4 (beta 5) will include hardware acceleration, mostly likely to combat the announcement in a few days regarding Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9, which will also have hardware acceleration.

So, which is better? If you read the msdn blog, you’ll find out that Microsoft believes it has the superior browser technology because they use “full hardware acceleration” as opposed to “partial hardware acceleration. In their own words.

With IE9, developers have a fully-hardware accelerated display pipeline that runs from their markup to the screen. Based on their blog posts, the hardware-accelerated implementations of other browsers generally accelerate one phase or the other, but not yet both. Delivering full hardware acceleration, on by default, is an architectural undertaking. When there is a desire to run across multiple platforms, developers introduce abstraction layers and inevitably make tradeoffs which ultimately impact performance and reduce the ability of a browser to achieve ‘native’ performance. Getting the full value of the GPU is extremely challenging and writing to intermediate layers and libraries instead of an operating system’s native support makes it even harder. Windows’ DirectX long legacy of powering of the most intensive 3D games has made DirectX the highest performance GPU-based rendering system available.

When you run other browsers that support hardware acceleration, you’ll notice that the performance on some of the examples from the IE Test Drive site is comparable to IE9 yet performance on other examples isn’t. The differences reflect the gap between full and partial hardware acceleration. As IE supports new, emerging Web standards, those implementations will also be fully hardware accelerated.

Hardware acceleration of HTML5 video is a great example. At MIX10, we showed the advantage of using hardware for video. In March, IE9 played two HD-encoded, 720p videos on a netbook using very little of the CPU while another browser maxed out the CPU while dropping frames playing only one of the videos. Because of full hardware acceleration of the entire pipeline, you experience great performance playing these videos while moving them around the page and styling and compositing them with opacity, using web standard markup.

I’ll leave the technical jargon up to you to decide, but it is worth noting that Firefox has had hardware acceleration since last year. That being said, they have yet to incorporate “full hardware acceleration” to date. Firefox Beta 4 included acceleration, while beta 5 had it turned on by default as long as you were on a computer running DX10 or greater.

In the race to produce the latest and greatest browser, it will be the browser that brings the most to the table in a fast and secure way. A decent user interface doesn’t hurt either.

Source:-http://www.windows7news.com/2010/09/10/ie9-full-hardware-acceleration/