Fran's Blog

I surf the web possibly a little too much. I love discovering new things. I read blogs from comics and programming to ones about Georgian London. Flash and other animation/video tools on the web, though, can be quite expensive on my laptop (and possibly desktop, but really I don’t hear the fan spinning up). The issue, up till now has partially been Flash, as Steve Jobs puts it, being buggy and slow. But the other part is because the main computer processor alone has been used for rendering.

The issue with that is that while you have your browser of choice open and various other programmes, the processor (CPU) is used more intensively. You can generally afford it, but it can slow down your machine somewhat. It is especially difficult to know that happens when you have a decent graphics card (GPU) just sitting there doing very little (it’ll be used mainly for gaming, but not really so much for general surfing). GPUs are also easier to upgrade than a CPU.

More recently. Silverlight, Flash and in future versions, your browser have started supporting hardware acceleration, so instead of your main computer’s CPU heating up. Some of the graphical tasks can be farmed out to the GPU. It’s exciting because it means a faster browsing experience, which everyone loves, but also developers (and let’s not forget designers) can now go a little more nuts with sites and will be able to produce more exciting user experiences (hopefully not too exciting, we all still like browsing speed, obvously).