Graphics demos
By timjoh. Thursday, 5. June 2008, 19:35:19
My name is Tim Johansson, I am a core technology developer at Opera. I work in the core graphics team which is responsible for all the rendering (of web pages, SVG and <canvas>) and image decoding in Opera.
In the middle of December Opera had an engineering seminar outside Oslo in Norway. At the seminar there were a few presentations. I gave a presentation about graphics in Opera and showed a few demos. In this post I will write about two of the demos, and link to videos of them.
Opera Flashlight
One of the first assignments I had at Opera was to work on a
technology for platform independent graphics, which is now
used in some of Operas products including the Opera SDK.
When working on it I quickly realized that this technology would make
it easy to upload Opera to a texture in a 3d application.
Since I had been working on a 3d engine for fun in my spare time I
spent a late evening integrating Opera into my 3d engine. The place I
thought sounded most fun to add it was as the projective texture used
for the flashlight in the 3d engine.
This video demonstrates the result of that late night hack more than 3 years ago.
Hardware acceleration
One of the things I have been working on lately is hardware acceleration of the vector graphics library used for SVG and <canvas> in Opera using 3d hardware (through OpenGL and Direct3D).
In order to get the most performance from rendering SVG/<canvas> in
hardware it is good to avoid reading the rendered image back from the
graphics card to system memory since that is a slow operation.
This can be solved by rendering all of Opera (including UI and web
pages) in hardware.
Rendering Opera in hardware also makes it possible to add visual effects
without any additional CPU cost.
This video shows a demo of Opera running fully hardware accelerated. The demo build used in this video is an interal Opera core technology reference build with hardware acceleration enabled. Hardware acceleration is still experimental and is not in any released or soon to be released products.

I want this on my Opera build.
Really nice work
How about flipping pages using a cube like the desktops in linux ?
By xErath, # 5. June 2008, 21:26:50
By YtseJam, # 5. June 2008, 21:31:50
By a_paddy, # 6. June 2008, 00:37:32
By Luchio, # 6. June 2008, 02:46:34
I can imagine a browser wars 3D game where weapons are projected correct rendering of standards tests like Acid3!
Tim, thanks for this...
By non-troppo, # 6. June 2008, 05:46:53
By Northgrove, # 6. June 2008, 10:26:43
Go Opera features!
By capricous, # 6. June 2008, 10:31:16
JT
http://www.Ultimate-Anonymity.com
By RedFoxOne, # 6. June 2008, 12:13:31
By KeMiSa, # 6. June 2008, 12:34:13
Is it coming to any Opera build ? Or it is only for testing ?
I would like to see it in the next version, Opera 10, OR EARLY !!!!
BEST FEATURE EVER SEEN !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
By brunito_c, # 6. June 2008, 15:42:58
But don't forget to make all transitional effects optional.
By FataL, # 6. June 2008, 15:55:05
By andresruiz, # 6. June 2008, 16:39:23
Does it render the entire page using the GPU or just specific parts?
By toyotabedzrock, # 7. June 2008, 21:02:59
By amphi, # 9. June 2008, 01:46:50
Ditto!
By VJgamer, # 11. June 2008, 03:49:59
BTW
It should be used in GTA IV, it would be great in-game internet (mostly real internet) browser
By lilmoder, # 12. June 2008, 22:16:10
p.s. check tags, you lost commas
By gr1b0k, # 19. June 2008, 14:20:26
I hope you could show us some more of this in the future. Good job indeed, it could be incredible to see this in Opera 10.
By PeaceDestroyer, # 10. July 2008, 12:18:18
Than you will can "copy" the
And for example for Ctrl + Tab (And Shift + Ctrl+Tab) can make something such as this: http://www.opera-bongeszo.com//sites/default/files/kepek/2008/9/fulvaltas.jpg
It will be super
By Lali19871014, # 30. August 2008, 11:42:07
By rafaelluik, # 5. September 2008, 21:52:48
By Opendix, # 2. October 2008, 18:27:21
By haavard, # 3. October 2008, 12:48:39
since they don't even have time to
post new blogposts
By stoffix, # 3. October 2008, 14:29:03
By haavard, # 7. October 2008, 12:35:39
By Opendix, # 9. October 2008, 20:04:38
What graphic card do i need to use this feature?
By honeydew, # 24. October 2008, 01:13:00
By Keldian, # 21. November 2008, 19:35:39
By tomas.sprlak, # 25. November 2008, 09:18:23