Opera 12 alpha Released with Hardware Accelerator Engine [Download]

Opera 12 Alpha, also codenamed as Opera Next, has stepped out of the shadows and is now available for you to download. The Opera Software team has been working hard integrating a new HTML5 rendering engine, tweaking the navigation bar and most notably enabling full hardware acceleration for web page rendering.

Whats great about this hardware acceleration feature is that all the elements of a webpage get rendered by your graphics card, which increases the speed of displaying the page on your monitor.

Although Opera unique Vega graphics engine is already lightning fast, Opera is now using your computer graphics card for extra processing power. This supercharged boost is called hardware acceleration and makes intensive web applications and games run even better.

To utilize hardware acceleration, Opera 12 alpha currently requires a graphics card, as well as OpenGL. Further support, including DirectX, will come later on Beta.