The title on HN is very editorialized and I can't overemphasize how preliminary and experimental this work is. Take all numbers with a huge grain of salt.<p>That said, I'm obviously really excited about this project. :) I feel strongly that it's the right from-scratch, modern approach for painting Web content. Happy to answer any questions.
I'd love to see a Web renderer based on Vulkan. The reduced CPU overhead and much improved threading should be a huge win. You'd be able to cache on the command buffer level instead of just the vertex buffer level. Seems like a bleeding edge graphics API would be a good match for an experimental project like Servo as well.<p>To really use Vulkan as efficiently as possible, though, you'd probably want to write a renderer mostly from scratch rather than maintaining some sort of abstraction layer to support both GL and Vulkan.
Is there an explanation of how exactly this differs from current browsers?<p>All things that are described in the page seem pretty "normal" and "obvious" things to do, so it's not quite clear which things are not being done in current browsers.
Great thing to see being worked on. Out of curiosity does any of Moz2D's back-ends support stencil then cover approach to rendering on the gpu.<p><a href="http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2012/presentations/S0024-GPU-Accelerated-Path-Rendering.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2012/presentations/S002...</a><p>At first I thought it might be a good idea to implement a gallium statetracker for such a framework but with the direct3d statetracker not being supported by projects like wine I thought maybe vulkan will open up an opportunity to implement something with similar performance which is driver,vendor and platform agnostic.
I often run browsers over ssh and I really hope this "draw programs like a game engine" stuff doesn't catch on.<p>This is already the approach taken by Chrome (trace Chrome and you'll just see a bunch of full window resolution PutImage calls), and it's very slow over the network, I get around 1 fps.<p>Firefox on the other hand uses more X11 calls, and it's much more responsive, close to running it locally.