Silverlight 5 hardware acceleration

Question

In order to gain the benefits of Hardware acceleration or any performance improvements in Silverlight 5 (beta), whether the client need to have IE9+. Can performance improvement be gained using IE6/IE7.

Whether performance features of Silverlight 5 are browser dependent?

Thanks.

Answer 1

No way it can be browser dependent. Silverlight is meant to be the same cross browser and close platform.

Another thing that makes me think so is the fact that we can run Silverlight out of browser with the same hardware acceleration benefits.