Internet Explorer 9 - The FishIE tank test!

I thought I'd give Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) a try and test out its claims of faster performance and hardware acceleration.

Microsoft's FishIE tank demo uses the canvas element to draw fish swimming in a fish tank. With IE9, hardware acceleration is used to speed up drawing with the canvas element. An FPS counter tells you how many frames per second the browser is able to draw.

My test system is a Core i5-430M (2.26GHz) with 4Gb RAM, running Windows 7 64-bit with IE9 32-bit. Since there is no Adobe Flash player for the 64-bit version of IE, I always use the 32-bit version, so did so for this test too. The graphics adapter is an ATi Radeon 5450 with 512Mb DDR3.

IE9 versus Firefox 3.6.15

We start with 20 fish and Firefox is unable to draw at the full 60 FPS, managing 48 FPS.

With 50 fish, IE is still at the full 60 FPS and Firefox has dropped to 35 FPS.

Let's try Chrome...

IE9 versus Google Chrome 10.0.648.133

We start with 20 fish and this time the rival browser is able to keep up with IE, drawing the full 60 FPS.

With 50 fish, Chrome is still pushing out 60 FPS.

On to 100 fish and Chrome now starts to show signs of breaking and drops 4 to 56 FPS.

With 250 fish, Chrome is still plugging along, managing 28 FPS.

Move on to a whopping 500 fish and Chrome is starting to chug, at 15 FPS. IE9 meanwhile is still pushing 60 FPS.

Is there any stopping IE? Well, yes. At 1000 fish on this modest test system it is finally losing some frames at 41 FPS.

Try the FishIE tank at:
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/performance/fishIETank/default.html