T60p with Windows 7, IE9 and GPU accelerated browsing

[Terrahawk]

Hi there,

I've just installed the IE9 beta on my T60p. It's running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, with some modded Catalyst 10.2 drivers. I've noticed however that despite everything else working well, GPU acceleration is disabled. After digging around a bit, it appears that these Windows 7 drivers (which are actually modded Vista 64-bit drivers) don't support Direct2D or whatever it is properly.

Does anyone know how to get this sorted so that GPU acceleration does work, or know of any updated FireGL V5250 drivers that do work with Windows 7 64-bit?

[Marin85]

Do you mean gpu acceleration in the sense of gpgpu? (Sorry, don´t know what technology IE9 beta utilizes.) If so, then unfortunately you might be out of luck as the Mobility FireGL V5200/V5250 don´t seem to support any gpgpu-stuff, not in Windows 7/Vista/XP in any case as far as I know (by this I mean no avivo, cuda/OpenCL-like stuff, video encoding/decoding, flash 10 acc. for HD etc.).

[Terrahawk]

IE9 uses Direct2D, which allows the GPU to draw text, maps 2D bitmaps to textures and other things like that as far as I understand. It's not GPGPU at all - the 945GM integrated graphics is supported and the FireGL kicks that around an all respects apart from power consumption and now, it appears driver support. I mean, the 945 isn't exactly a new product either.

[Marin85]

Ok, I see what is meant here. Then just ignore my previous post

You say you are using some modded Vista drivers. Have you tried with the driver provided by windows update?

[Terrahawk]

I haven't tried the driver from Windows Update. I hadn't thought of that. It's a kind of a trade off though... I'll be trading one set of features for another. Mind you, it's worth a go.

[Marin85]

May I ask, in what sense would it be a trade-off? You know, you can still keep the Catalyst Control Center with all its whistles and bells. (I am asking because I am using the driver from windows update together with a CCC from some modded driver package, so I am naturally curious about any disadvantages of the M$ driver.)

[Terrahawk]

Nothing at all now - I wasn't aware that you could keep the Catalyst Control Center. Well, the modded driver is slightly newer. In any case, it didn't work.

[honray]

I have been investigating this issue for some time since I recently loaded Windows 7.

I believe it comes down to ATI's lack of support for DirectX 10, or any support for Windows 7 at all.

The T60p's firegl V5250 lacks any official Windows 7 drivers as well as DirectX 10 support.

Unless we can find a way to load DirectX10 (WDDM 1.1) drivers for the firegl V5250, I'm afraid we will not be able to use Hardware Acceleration with IE9.

Even my girlfriends laptop with lowly integrated graphics from Intel supports GPU Acceleration on IE9.

ATI discontinued driver support for the Radeon X1400 and Firegl V5200's. We got screwed.

As far as I know, there is no way to upgrade the video card on a laptop like the T60p. It's built into the design of the motherboard isn't it?

T61p and the nvidia card it uses supports DX10... Afraid I missed it by one generation!