Opera 12 alpha adds 3D hardware acceleration

Norwegian browser developer Opera has made a new GPU-accelerated Opera 12 alpha version available for download.

"With the new hardware accelerated backend Opera will draw the whole user interface using the GPU, not just specific elements of the webpage like the canvas element," wrote Huib Kleinhout on the Opera desktop team blog.

"This will offload the CPU significantly and make it possible to accelerate the rendering of all webpages," he added. Kleihout also stressed that the alpha version could have "severe" issues "including crashes, and data loss situations."

At the moment Opera 12 is using OpenGL but the developer is hoping to add DirectX and support a wider variety of graphics cards in forthcoming versions.