Google Chrome 7 will come with GPU acceleration

Hot on the heels of a report that the latest Firefox 4 beta has code for GPU acceleration is the news that support for hardware acceleration will be found in an upcoming version of Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Chrome. The Chrome team has apparently put a lot of thought into the design, and you can find the design document detailing the specifications and how the hardware acceleration works here.

Currently available as a developer build, Chrome 7 makes use of hardware acceleration to render web pages in layers. For those not familiar with the Chrome browser: Chrome 5 is the current release version while Chrome 6 is currently in beta.

Of course, Chrome's sandboxed rendering model means that implementing any form of hardware acceleration in Google is a tad more difficult compared to Internet Explorer or Firefox. As you can imagine, Google has not divulged any target release dates for either Chrome 6 or Chrome 7.

For now, users itching to give hardware acceleration a spin can download Chrome 7 from the developer channel here. Launching Chrome from the command line with the enable-accelerated-compositing flag is also necessary at this point to enable the acceleration. A "CPU process" is supposed to appear under the browser's task manager if the GPU rendering is in use.

For more on this story:
- check out the article at The Register
- check out the article at Toms Guide

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