Surfing the Internet is one of the most fundamental uses of a PC in the current situation. But despite this the direction is seen as a simple and not very demanding work for our computers, it is often heavier than you imagine. Websites are becoming more sophisticated and often use heavy graphic elements. Now it seems that we are entering a new era where our graphics cards will become an increasingly important component also for our presence on the Internet.

Adobe has presented a first version of Flash 10.1, which will enlist the help of your graphics card for playing Flash-based features such as YouTube videos and the like.

Now, Microsoft has revealed details of the Internet Explorer browser 9, which uses the graphics chip to accelerate the loading of the home page's 2D elements. The goal is to transfer as much as possible of the work on our graphics chips, and when we talk of both images and text that is rendered using the computer's GPU.

This is done by dropping the Windows GDI interface for managing images and puts it over the Direct2D and DirecWrite interfaces. The end result is not only higher performance when rendering of websites, but also better looking and more readable fonts.

Microsoft has already shown some examples of the benefits of GPU-accelerated browsers to scroll through Bing Maps, which is quite a demanding application and gives clear better experience with IE9 and GPU acceleration.