[webkit-dev] Announcing the TyGL-WebKit port to accelerate 2D web rendering with GPU

Hi All, We are proud to announce the TyGL port (link: http://github.com/szeged/TyGL) on the top of EFL-WebKit. TyGL (pronounced as tigel) is part of WebKit and provides 2D-accelerated GPU rendering on embedded systems. The engine is purely GPU based. It has been developed on and tested against ARM-Mali GPU, but it is designed to work on any GPU conforming to OpenGL ES 2.0 or higher. The GPU involvement on future graphics is inevitable considering the pixel growth rate of displays, but harnessing the GPU power requires a different approach than CPU-based optimizations. 2D graphics is traditionally software-based however, and 2D APIs are interfaces to these CPU-based algorithms. WebKit GraphicsContext API is no different, so the key challenge of our project was and is producing the expected output in a GPU friendly way. Key features: Batching pipeline: GPU provides the highest performance when a large number of triangles are drawn with a single draw command without any OpenGL state changes. The GraphicsContext API in WebKit provides draw operations for single shapes however, which can result frequent state changes if implemented naively. TyGL was designed to group these commands to reduce the number of draw calls. Automatic shader generator: TyGL can generate complex shaders from multiple shader fragments, which allows efficient batching but it also takes care to make them fit into the shader cache of the GPU. Trapezoid based path rendering: TyGL uses trapezoid-based tesselation of shapes and the GPU renders them with high anti-aliasing quality. We are continuously improving this part of the engine and look forward to make use of new GPU capabilities (like Pixel Local Storage) to squeeze more performance out of it. No software fallback: The whole engine is optimized for GPU without legacy software fallback. Hence we don't need to sacrifice optimizations for compatibility. There are enough software based 2D libraries which can be used when GPU is not available. TyGL is already capable of rendering many web-sites correctly, but some features have not been implemented yet. We continue this work and we are open to contributions from the community. Contact to us if you want more information about the project. Regards, U-Szeged's web browser team.