Over the last 15 years GPUs have gone from being a piece of hardware found almost exclusively on the machines of gamers, to being present in almost every single desktop and laptop computer. This hardware presents opportunities to greatly improve power usage and performance for graphics applications. Over the last 5 years GPU utilization in the desktop application world for accelerating 2D graphics has slowly moved forward, however their intended use for video games also presents us with a number of limitations.

In this presentation I will talk about what GPUs are, why we want to use them, in what different ways they can be put to use, and some of the challenges we've encountered when using them at Mozilla. I will also try and touch on some of the technical details on the different tradeoffs that the most common algorithms present.