Introducing Skia Graphite: Chrome's rasterization backend for the future

What happened

Over the years, Ganesh matured into a solid highly performant rasterization backend and GPU rasterization launched on all platforms in Chrome on top of GL (via ANGLE on Windows D3D9/11). Today's The Fast and the Curious post covers the launch of Skia's new rasterization backend, Graphite, in Chrome on Apple Silicon Macs.

Graphite is instrumental in helping Chrome achieve exceptional scores on Motionmark 1.3 and is key to unlocking a ton of future improvements in Chrome Graphics. A brief history of Skia in Chrome In Chrome, Skia is used to render paint commands from Blink and the browser UI into pixels on your screen, a process called rasterization.

Skia has powered Chrome Graphics since the very beginning . However, Ganesh always had a GL-centric design with too many specialized code paths and the team was hitting a wall when trying to implement optimizations that took advantage of modern graphics APIs in a principled manner.