This is going to be a rather technical dive into a recent improvement that went into WebRender. Texture atlas allocation In order to submit work to the GPU efficiently, WebRender groups as many drawing primitives as it can into what we call batches. A batch is submitted to the GPU as a single drawing command and has a few constraints. for example a batch can only reference a fixed set of resources (such as GPU buffers and textures). So in order to group as many drawing primitives as possible in a single batch we need to place as many drawing parameters as possible in few resources. When render ..read more

Hi there! This is a guest post from Robert Mader, who contributed enormous improvements to Firefox’s graphics stack on Linux. TL;DR In the upcoming Firefox 94 release we will enable the EGL backend for a big group of our Linux users. This will increase WebGL performance, reduce resource consumption and make our life as developers easier going forward. Background In order to use hardware accelerated APIs like OpenGL with windowing systems like X11 or Wayland there needs to be an interface bringing them together. For OpenGL on X11 most programs use GLX, while its successor, EGL, gets used on Way ..read more

WebGPU is a new standard for graphics and computing on the Web. Our team is actively involved in the design and specification process, while developing an implementation in Gecko. We’ve made a lot of progress since the last public update in Mozilla Hacks blog, and we’d like to share! WebGPU textured+lit cube in Firefox Nightly with WGSL shaders. See full code in the fork.API Tracing Trouble-shooting graphics issues can be tough without proper tools. In WebRender, we have the capture infrastructure that allows us to save the state of the rendering pipeline at any given moment to disk, and repla ..read more

Hello everyone! I know you have been missing your favorite and only newsletter about software engineers staying at home, washing their hands often and fixing strange rendering glitches in Firefox’s graphics engine. In the last two months there has been a heap of fixes and improvements. Before the usual change list I’ll go through a few highlights: A number of us focused on shipping WebRender to a wider range of Intel devices on Windows. This involved quite a bit of testing, profiling, puzzlement about driver behavior and of course heaps of improvements, a lot of which will benefit other confi ..read more

Hey all, Jim Mathies here, the new Mozilla Graphics Team manager. We haven’t had a Graphics Newsletter since July, so there’s lots to catch up on. TL/DR – We’re shipping our Rust based WebRender backend to a very wide audience as of Firefox 84. Read on for more detail on our progress. WebRender Current Status The release audience for WebRender has expanded quite a bit over the last six months. As a result we expect to achieve nearly 80% desktop coverage by the end of the year and have a goal of shipping to 100% of our user base by next summer.  Operating System Support MacOS – As of Firef ..read more

Bonjour, bonjour! Another long overdue episode of your favourite Mozilla gfx team newsletter is here. A few weeks ago, Jessie published a call to help us find steps to reproduce a mysterious glitch. Thanks a ton to everyone who helped out with this one! Glenn landed a fix to an issue that we suspect might be the cause of the issues . Don’t hesitate to let us know if you are still running into this particular glitch with Firefox Nightly and WebRender enabled. Other than that there are a number of pretty exciting things going on in WebRender. One of them is Lee and Jeff’s work on a software back ..read more

Bonjour à tous et à toutes, this is episode 53 of your favorite and only Firefox graphics newsletter. From now on instead of peeling through commit logs, I will be simply gathering notes sent to me by the rest of the team. This means the newsletter will be shorter, hopefully a bit less overwhelming with only the juicier bits. It will also give yours-truly more time to fix bugs instead of writing about it. Lately we have been enabling WebRender for a lot more users. For the first time, WebRender is enabled by default in Nightly for Windows 7 and macOS users with modern GPUs. Today 78% of Nightl ..read more

Hi there! Another gfx newsletter incoming. Glenn and Sotaro’s work on integrating WebRender with DirectComposition on Windows is close to being ready. We hope to let it ride the trains for Firefox 75. This will lead to lower GPU usage and energy consumption. Once this is done we plan to follow up with enabling WebRender by default for Windows users with (some subset of) Intel integrated GPUs, which is both challenging (these integrated GPUs are usually slower than discrete GPUs and we have run into a number of driver bugs with them on Windows) and rewarding as it represents a very large part o ..read more

For the past little while, we have been tracking some interesting WebRender bugs that people are reporting in release. Despite best efforts, we have been unable to determine clear steps to reproduce these issues and have been unable to find a fix for them. Today we are announcing a special challenge to the community – help us track down steps to reproduce (a.k.a STR) for this bug and you will win some special, limited edition Firefox Graphics team swag! Read on for more details if you are interested in participating. What we know so far about the bug: Late last year we started seeing reports o ..read more

By way of introduction, I invite you to read Markus’ excellent post on this blog about CoreAnimation integration yielding substantial improvements in power usage if you haven’t already. Next steps in this OS compositor integration saga include taking advantage CoreAnimation with WebRender’s picture caching infrastructure (rendering tiles directly into CoreAnimation surfaces), as well as rendering using a similar mechanism on Windows via DirectComposition surfaces. Markus, Glenn and Sotaro are making good progress on all of these fronts. What’s new in gfx WebGPU Kvark landed WebGPU’s infrastruc ..read more