Although Hachamovitch declined to peg a goal for IE9's hardware-based acceleration, he said early results have been encouraging. "On top of GDI, we were seeing IE render at 5-10 frames per second. Users don't know whether that's [caused by] the network, or a site script, but it just seems kind of slow to them. Using [Direct2D], we're seeing 40, 50 or 60 frames per second. That's game-like responsiveness."

Because the image and text rendering -- DirectWrite results in much sharper text -- is done by Windows in conjunction with the GPU, there's nothing Web site or Web application developers will have to do to make their sites seem faster to IE9 users. "Web developers can take advantage of the hardware ecosystem's advances in graphics, but don't have to rewrite their sites to do that," Hachamovitch said.

Microsoft isn't alone in exploring graphics acceleration: The top engineers at Mozilla and Opera both said that their companies are pursing the same grail.

"We have our own projects to use OpenGL on open platforms, and Microsoft's APIs on Windows," said Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering. OpenGL, or Open Graphics Library, is an open-source set of function calls used to render two- and three-dimensional images.

Opera, like Mozilla, doesn't limit itself to building a browser for Windows only, as does Microsoft, and so faces the same cross-platform issues as Mozilla. But hardware acceleration is coming, argued Hakon Wium Lie, Opera's chief technology officer. "We're going to see hardware acceleration across the board," Wie said. "But we can't tie ourselves to a single API, like Microsoft."