Download Opera with Hardware Acceleration

By | March 1, 2011


Download Opera with Hardware AccelerationNow here is something for Opera users to play with, as Norwegian browser maker has recently released a public build of Opera that finally supports hardware acceleration.

Although it’s just a preview (not intended for daily use) and available for Windows users only, company promises that their standards based canvas implementation will also work with Linux or Mac OS X operating systems. Now isn’t that nice?

How is that possible?

Opera has decided to use WebGL (Web-based Graphics Language) which essentially allows running hardware acceleration not only on computers, but also on mobile phones or even TVs as long as they support OpenGL 2.x.

That means you have to have a compatible video card and drivers to enable such feature.

For more details and download link, visit the following page.

Thanks to everyone who sent this!


About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

Comments (21)

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  1. It needs more polishing, and it seems that it will appear in 11.50 not in upcoming 11.10, but its great to have it finally.

  2. Good stuff, doesn’t work for me, though. Good to see it is in a distant release, for it needs more work.

    • Hello says:

      Of course it needs more work. It was released on Opera Labs. Why state the blindingly obvious?

  3. MrG says:

    I’m finding even the non-accelerated Opera totally kills the competition with regards to speed, this just pushes it even further into the distance.

    It’s clearly not ready for primetime just yet (it failed to work on my NVidia GS7800 card), but worked on my NVidia based (and older) laptop, it also doesn’t have smooth scrolling.

    Still it’s a great start, and right now much further ahead than the other browsers implementations. It also supports ALL OSes, which is it’s killer feature.

  4. Sirnh1 says:

    The current implementation only supports OpenGL, but they will also add Direct3D. Also noteworthy might be that they will add support for every OS that has the needed hardware support. (Meaning they’ll also support windows XP )
    Seems to work on my end, although still has some problems. First time I did the fishtanks it stayed at 60 FPS, when I tried again after restarting, it only got to 56 FPS… Still great for an alpha though…

  5. Greg says:

    not impressed i’ll stick to chrome

    • Splatgun says:

      Take your government driven google chrome and get lost. Bet you have gmail as your email and google.com as your default page too.
      Never ever put all your eggs in one basket, especially when it is a spy driven company like google.

      • Greg says:

        Who cares if its spy driven most famous web sites are too. I think your upset your browser isnt doing so well as Google i mean Opera always have problems loading websites the wrong way. Especially if a website is designed for IE or Firefox I have to click identify as Firefox/IE to make it look original especially this website which is a pain and Google Chrome I dont have to do that everything is perfect and looks the way it should be. Although Opera is kicking ass in acceleration right now gotta give it to them.

        • Shane Bundy says:

          While Opera’s right on using OpenGL for HW-acceleration cross-platform I can’t imagine what a DirectX build could do. About your other point Opera displays web pages fine for me w/o spoofing.

          I’m not against Google but I think Chrome’s a noobs browser: it doesn’t have the features other browsers have and it’s over 80MB (or 160MB if you add the “chrome.7z’ file).

        • Rudi Visser says:

          Could you give me examples of sites that don’t work??

          I’ve never had a single issue.

        • Welloh says:

          “Google Chrome I dont have to do that everything is perfect and looks the way it should be”

          Except sites like Gmail that don’t work well in Chrome despite both being made by the same company?

        • Greg says:

          Its pretty clear that opera’s compatibility just blows

          I gave this browser a try again and look what happens when im on youtube ive never had this problem on any browser not even IE
          http://i53.tinypic.com/103etra.jpg

          I also had downloaded 4 files at once one time and the whole opera crashed on me but I forgot to take a screen shot of it opera is not good with tabs at all

          Opera I give up

          • Cousin333 says:

            I hope you are not complaining about an Opera lab build.. I’ve tried that page with no less than 3 different Opera versions (stable and weeklies), and I didn’t have a single problem. Nor with downloads, so the problem seems to be on your side, if this shot was taken in Opera 11.01 with the latest Flash.

            Mentioning IE for compatibility problems is just stupid. Everyone knows, that because of being the most popular browser out there – hate it or not – every page is hacked till it works with IE.

          • OmgGhosts says:

            I’ve never had that problem with YouTube in Opera, ever. Nor do I have any problems download files.

            But wait a second.. are you using an experimental build and complaining about bugs? Is that what you are saying?

            You give up because you installed an experimental build that was released to demo one specific thing?

            I see. How rational and logical of you.

        • Greg says:

          this was on Opera 11 stable not this build

  6. Chrome – the thing that brings a system to its knees when restoring 4 tabs. I guess it’ll never be able to restore my 40 tabs session in Opera :)

    Anyway – on to the topic – as an Opera fan I’m still impressed with their decision: bring the best to everybody not only to the (un)privileged users of Win7.

    • Shane Bundy says:

      I think having cross-platform HW-accel. in OpenGL was a good call for those on non-Windows platforms. They can have the same amount of acceleration across all OSes if the abstract layer is implemented right.

      • Cousin333 says:

        In fact it was the only good call for a company that makes its living on web browsers running an all kind of devices from phones, through game consoles to TV sets.

        Still, there will be a Direct3D version for Windows.

  7. RamaSubbu_SK says:

    Finally here comes the Opera with OpenGL. Wow!!