[whatwg] Hardware accelerated canvas

[Kornel Lesiński]

On Tue, 04 Sep 2012 19:35:32 +0100, Justin Novosad <junov at chromium.org>  
wrote:

> That doesn't sound too evil, but the ideal solution would be one that  
> would not involve web standards at all. If there was a way of ensuring  
> GPU
> resource persistence on mobile platforms (swap-out resources rather than
> discard them), then we would not be having this conversation. Making that
> happen is a debate for a different audience. Unfortunately OS and  
> graphics APIs don't evolve at whatwg pace.

Indeed.

I think it'd be ideal if browsers could hide this problem from developers  
(with command logging, snapshotting or other tricks) until improvements in  
OS/drivers/hardware make this a non-issue (e.g. if the OS can notify  
applications before gfx context is lost, then browsers could snapshot then  
and problem will be gone for good)

Until then great performance can still be achieved with some heuristics  
and accepted risk of loss, e.g. don't snapshot for 1/10th of a second  
after canvas has been cleared, don't log commands from  
requestAnimationFrame() etc.

-- 
regards, Kornel