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Comment by dstaheli | Hacker News Reader

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dstaheli·

Wow, I'm a Chrome user, but I'm impressed with how much better this performs in IE.

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Like because of the Angle translation layer that is between WebGL and DirectX on Windows:

https://code.google.com/p/angleproject/

It is likely the IE team didn't worry about portability of IE between Windows, Linux and OSX, thus they did some direct connection to DirectX that wasn't that feasible for the Chrome team.

I believe there is an extra layer of indirection in chrome. IE can implement WebGL using DirectX, while chrome uses OpenGL, which under windows is a wrapper over DirectX. This may not be true of all video cards/drivers but I believe it's the default implementation of OpenGL under windows.

OpenGL has never been implemented in terms of DirectX on windows. No idea what you are talking about here.

When Vista first came out, Microsoft forced OpenGL to be a layer above DirectX. But they pretty quickly backed down and let people build direct OpenGL drivers again.

Ah, this is where I got it from. I didn't realize they changed it back.

Yeah, I know this is true for the AMD driver, at least. Their Catalyst ("fglrx") OpenGL implementation is shared between Linux and Windows, with a fairly low-level wrapper for each OS. [1][2]

[1] http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?106228-RadeonS...

[2] http://amd-dev.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wordpress/media/2012/...

Just read your comment and tried it in IE... Wow! In IE the experience is much better!

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