Chrome has launched Skia Graphite, a new GPU rasterization backend that replaces the older Ganesh system. Graphite delivers 15% better Motionmark 1.3 scores on Apple Silicon Macs while improving real-world metrics like interaction timing and graphics smoothness. The new backend leverages modern graphics APIs through WebGPU Dawn, implements 2D depth testing to reduce overdraw, and supports multithreading by design. Unlike Ganesh's specialized shader approach, Graphite consolidates rendering pipelines to prevent performance cliffs and compilation jank. Future plans include multithreaded rasterization, reduced GPU memory usage for simple content, and GPU compute-based path rasterization.
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