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WebRender is in beta

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Re: WebRender is in beta

#51

Post by pcwalton »

ummonk wrote: post #41
tamasnet wrote: post #24

For anyone (like me) not familar with WebRender, here's a great writeup: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-f... Also a great read for anyone interested in long-form technical articles that try to serve a wide range of reader types.

I'd be curious how the power usage compares between this GPU rendering and the old CPU painting / compositing rendering. I'd expect it to save power but could also see it going the other way, particularly for webpages with minimal changes from frame to frame.

At present power usage tends to be worse with WebRender, but I'm working on that with OS compositing (planeshift), and Glenn is working on that with picture caching. I expect it to be an overall energy consumption improvement over the old graphics system once this work is complete, due to reduced overdraw and better use of OS composition.

Re: WebRender is in beta

#52

Post by chmln »

pcwalton wrote: post #46
chmln wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've experienced the exact same thing on latest thunderbird betas and nightlies. Its a shame that GPU support by Mozilla products is in such abysmal state. Meanwhile Google has working hardware accelerated video decoding AND decent GPU support in Chrome.

This is that "GPU support", on Linux anyway. Hardware accelerated video decoding is barely worth it on Linux. Crashes galore. Does Chromium even enable it by default? The problem is not writing the "GPU support", but working around the mountain of Xorg bugs that it triggers. As an example just this week, I recently ripped out OS compositing support from WebRender on X because it was simply impossible to deploy withou…

Glad to hear work this is something that's being worked on because Firefox is still losing market share. And that's not good news for all of us.

You may put GPU support in quotation marks, but Chromium is way snappier and faster than Firefox nightlies on my Linux box, and I suspect taking advantage of the GPU is a part of the equation.

I also suspect the whole pipeline is more optimized on Chrome. Firefox has ~3x the input latency[1] and unlike Chrome, also slaughters my CPU when watching youtube videos.

Its not like Mozilla is under-resourced. I think its just a matter of priority[2].

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1408699

[2] https://blog.servo.org/2018/03/09/servo-and-mixed-reality/

Re: WebRender is in beta

#53

Post by pcwalton »

chmln wrote: post #52
pcwalton wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is that "GPU support", on Linux anyway. Hardware accelerated video decoding is barely worth it on Linux. Crashes galore. Does Chromium even enable it by default? The problem is not writing the "GPU support", but working around the mountain of Xorg bugs that it triggers. As an example just this week, I recently ripped out OS compositing support from WebRender on X because it was simply impossible to deploy withou…

Glad to hear work this is something that's being worked on because Firefox is still losing market share. And that's not good news for all of us. You may put GPU support in quotation marks, but Chromium is way snappier and faster than Firefox nightlies on my Linux box, and I suspect taking advantage of the GPU is a part of the equation. I also suspect the whole pipeline is more optimized on Chrome. Firefox has ~3x the…

I'm putting "GPU support" in quotes because "GPU support" is such a broad topic that it's impossible to pin down precisely what you might mean by it. There aren't any areas I'm aware of in which Chrome uses the GPU whereas Firefox doesn't. If anything, WebRender makes it the reverse, though since Chrome uses Skia-GL it's more of a matter of which GPU features a browser uses rather than whether a browser uses the GPU (in particular, WebRender uses the Z-buffer and the early-Z functionality, which are quite an improvement).

I will say that, in my opinion, WebRender is generally better optimized for modern graphics hardware than Skia-GL as used in Chrome, due to the reduced overdraw via aggressive use of the Z-buffer and better batching.

Often times performance bugs are just that—bugs. The existence of performance bugs doesn't necessarily indicate that "the whole pipeline" in one browser is better than the other. Browsers are broadly quite comparable in terms of the script-layout-painting pipeline these days. In the case of Firefox, I'm personally confident in the IonMonkey-Stylo-WebRender trio.

Re: WebRender is in beta

#54

Post by jadbox »

For pages like Facebook and Reddit, the performance is great. But Chrome is almost double the framerate for svg animations (I measured on a Macbook).

Re: WebRender is in beta

#55

Post by pcwalton »

jadbox wrote: post #54

For pages like Facebook and Reddit, the performance is great. But Chrome is almost double the framerate for svg animations (I measured on a Macbook).

WebRender doesn't accelerate SVG yet. That will be the second stage of the Pathfinder work. Stay tuned :)

Re: WebRender is in beta

#56

Post by detaro »

chmln wrote: post #31
actionscripted wrote: post #27

Enabled in FF Nightly 65.0a1 (2018-10-26) (64-bit) and it felt a little sluggish especially with regards to scrolling. I understand it's in beta but I guess I was expecting things to "feel" faster. Tried resizing larger sites/pages and things felt snappy but scrolling felt jumpy and off. That said, can't wait for this to come out of beta!

I've experienced the exact same thing on latest thunderbird betas and nightlies. Its a shame that GPU support by Mozilla products is in such abysmal state. Meanwhile Google has working hardware accelerated video decoding AND decent GPU support in Chrome.

Chromium has long-standing unresolved issues about adding GPU acceleration for video decoding too?

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=463440

https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/53...

Re: WebRender is in beta

#57

Post by pcwalton »

detaro wrote: post #56
chmln wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've experienced the exact same thing on latest thunderbird betas and nightlies. Its a shame that GPU support by Mozilla products is in such abysmal state. Meanwhile Google has working hardware accelerated video decoding AND decent GPU support in Chrome.

Chromium has long-standing unresolved issues about adding GPU acceleration for video decoding too? https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=463440 https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/53...

Honestly, I think it isn't worth it, as long as we're on X. X11 is not a reasonable protocol, and Xorg is not a reasonable implementation anymore. It's had a good run, but it's time to move on.

Re: WebRender is in beta

#58

Post by pcwalton »

cztomsik wrote: post #36

I've just made very basic integration with node. It's rather PoC, but it works. It can currently show a window and render moving rect from vue.js template. There's still a lot of work to be done, webrender does too little to be just drop in replacement for electron but it might be worth watching if you're interested in anything like that (lightweight cross-platform opengl-rendered gui apps developed in react/vue/angu…

I really like these kinds of projects—lightweight UI frameworks on top of WebRender. Fantastic to see :)

Re: WebRender is in beta

#59

Post by johnny22 »

cztomsik wrote: post #36

I've just made very basic integration with node. It's rather PoC, but it works. It can currently show a window and render moving rect from vue.js template. There's still a lot of work to be done, webrender does too little to be just drop in replacement for electron but it might be worth watching if you're interested in anything like that (lightweight cross-platform opengl-rendered gui apps developed in react/vue/angu…

I was imagining graphene would be something like an electron replacement

Re: WebRender is in beta

#60

Post by Manishearth »

chmln wrote: post #52
pcwalton wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is that "GPU support", on Linux anyway. Hardware accelerated video decoding is barely worth it on Linux. Crashes galore. Does Chromium even enable it by default? The problem is not writing the "GPU support", but working around the mountain of Xorg bugs that it triggers. As an example just this week, I recently ripped out OS compositing support from WebRender on X because it was simply impossible to deploy withou…

Glad to hear work this is something that's being worked on because Firefox is still losing market share. And that's not good news for all of us. You may put GPU support in quotation marks, but Chromium is way snappier and faster than Firefox nightlies on my Linux box, and I suspect taking advantage of the GPU is a part of the equation. I also suspect the whole pipeline is more optimized on Chrome. Firefox has ~3x the…

You're literally talking to one of the main initial people behind the Mozilla project that uses the GPU for browser rendering more than any other browser, on the comments of a post about this stuff making its way to a release.

Webrender has a pretty large team working on it at this point.

You have no idea what you're talking about here.

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