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At the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference
downix writes "At Toms Hardware they're running an article where they discuss the next-generation Windows graphics system. The big part of the scoop, it's being done via DirectX. Have to validate those 2Ghz CPU's and GPU's that need their own nuclear power plant to run somehow." Some other interesting things there - quiet PCs, more about the Oqo, etc.
...how the PC industry is going to take Apple's styling, innovations and designs and incorporate them into Windows hardware. I guess its better late than never...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I'd rather see the load being taken off the power supply. I mean, graphics are nice, but as Michael alludes to, it's gonna take a friggin nuclear power plant to supply the juice- I'd rather see the hardware focusing on lower power consumption. you know, perfect what they got before moving to the next step. Now that I live off campus, I see how much juice my machines run, and well, 300watt powersupplies suck for electric bills.
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Graphics hardware gets to power the Windows shell, and compositing is going to be the big deal. Windows will be treated like surfaces, as opposed to rectangular blocks of bits, as they are now. Everything, in effect, is a texture. GPUs certainly know how to move textures around, and manipulate them, and work with them. Longhorn puts the pressure on the 3D engines of GPUs, and Microsoft is exploring minimum hardware requirements and standards for OEMs to aim for.
If windows are textures, it seems like it will be pretty difficult to get perfect 1-to-1 mapping of pixels via a graphics gpu. Right now, the only thing that is a big deal is "jaggies", but noone expects a perfect image of textures. I know part of this is the game itself, but it is very hard to make textures fit exactly how you want them to.
Sounds neat tho, if they can pull it off. Middle of the next decade indeed.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
Lets give DirectX a break. I know that computers running apps for it are completely decked out, but look at the graphics for christ's sake! With all of the enhancements that have been made between the hardware companies (ATI, NVIDIA) in conjunction with M$ (dx 8.1 enhancements) we are seeing some kick ass games, delivered in a relatively fast time due to a universal API. I think it is a good thing.
-Mod me up, I need the karma!!
Yeah...my thoughts exactly.
Have to validate those 2Ghz CPU's and GPU's that need their own nuclear power plant to run somehow."
Ya, and they can use the cooling towers to cool those bad boys too!
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Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
Personally, I see little driving the next generation windows boxes. I mean seriously, most computers that are 3 years old will do most things the average person could ever want. It'll burn CDs, play DVDs, read email, do word processing, email, blah blah blah...
What's next to drive people to upgrading? Will the game market be enough to drive the market?
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Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
Ensuring that my 7ghz machine with 40 gigs of ram and 520 TB of HD storage will still choke on a mp12 while scrolling with my MS MindMouse.
Add this to the long list of Microsoft presentation blunders. A too hot for TV MS bloopers tape is due out soon.
As Pratchett said (in The Truth), do they mean transparant as in you can see through to their motives or transparant as in you can't see their motives at all.
Microsoft staffers spent a long time hand carving this imposing statue of BillG at the entrance to WinHEC. Based on Native American folklore from the Northwest apparently it wards off government lawyers. :)
Nothing, and that's the beauty of MS's strategy. Windows releases are always endorsed by celebrities, big promo events, etc etc (didn't 'The Rock' help plug Windows XP?). When Microsoft, the OS company, releases a new version or updates their old products, everyone has to have it...regardless of how well their old systems (whether that's hardware or software) work to fit their needs.
Effective marketing, goddman them all.
Well, I think what's happening is companies are tired of seeing office machines being given 3-4 year old graphics cards! :) Most machines for the office don't need (or so someone says) a nice graphics card so now office workers put up with slower graphics because they have a Riva or something to that effect in thier machine. Used to be there was not much difference in a office machine and a home machine. Not anymore. I think Nvidia would like to lower the price of their high end but can't because there are many (I am one of those!) who don't see the point in buying thier firebreather when a Geforce 2 MX works just fine for about 95 percent of the people....even some games can be played just fine on a 2 MX. No Microsoft is feeling the pressure from the hardware folks because for some reason, they can't convince OEMS to use thier firebreathing Geforce and P4 chips in machines that are sold to grandma's (many more grandma's then hardcore gamers). If they could sell more of those, then they don't have to charge 300+ for one of those nice cards. If the OS used it more, then people would be forced to go get that new graphics card. The demand would be up and the price would take a plunge. It's ALL about eyecandy. Users dig it! (I don't need it all of the time, but I dig it too if it can look good and be fast!)
Gorkman
One that can be removed without bringing the rest of the OS and its applications crashing down around it, so that it is technically and - please, dear God - legally and economically possible for me to buy equipment without it integrated if I have no need for it!
Quote from article:
24-bit True Color, or 8 bits per pixel, is not enough. Microsoft is pushing graphics board vendors to implement greater than 8 bpp in order.
This is great! Its so awful being stuck with only 256 colours to choose from! Think of all the different shades of blue they'll have in the next version of windows!
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
Not to repeat what was said in the slashdot thread to it, but man does the oQo look sweet. I really hope they can pull this off, this looks like the perfect eBook reader, to start with. Too bad games won't run well on it, though I'm sure older ones will work great - GBA emulation on a oQo sounds like another sweet idea. I pray it's not vaporware.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
The article mentions that the entire desktop will be made in vector graphics. That was mentioned several years ago, and, there is a (slowly developing) project for Linux named Berlin which also is a vector based desktop.
http://www.berlin-consortium.org/
Hopefully that will pace up!
We all know that the colors you see on your monitor don't exactly end up being the same as the colors you get on your inkjet printer, or on your LCD, or in real life.
Why is it gonna take MS 3 more years to implement what Apple did 10 years ago?
(Yeah, I know it's not quite the same thing, but MS still hasn't given us a simple OS-level color matching system!)
Oh cripes... OpenGL makes direct X look like the work of a 3rd grade art student... Great effort but it's not what I want to bet my life on.
if microsoft would just quit trying to stuff everything THEY think is great down the developers throats and focus on OS and API design (STANDARD API not what they can convolute) I'm betting that 90% of the ms-slammers would no longer care.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Dust
That crap can kill any PC. Eventually it will die, and die hard.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
It's not difficult to get this correct. It used to be a problem with the first couple of generations of graphics cards because they didn't all do things the same way, but nowadays it's pretty straightforward, as anything TNT1 level or later will do it correctly. You just need to offset the coordinates by half a pixel, ensuring that when the sample is taken, no filtering is required.
As usual, it's amusing to see MS following the lead of others -- in this case, OS X is using a 3D API (OpenGL) as the implementation base for its GUI and other 2D graphics on the desktop today.
For me, a more interesting question is whether this move indicates the slowdown of the evolution of D3D. D3D has been free to evolve without much concern for release-to-release compatibility largely because game developers change their codebase so much more rapidly than other application developers. But if the mainstream app developers begin to use D3D, the API will gain a lot more inertia.
"Some"? Holy heck, welcome to the problem. I've just built a machine for my brother. An XP 1700+, 256Mb of DDR 2100 and a 64Mb GeForce 2 MX 400 with TV out. We debated hardest on the card. He wanted to go for a GeForce 3 TI to future proof himself. Here's how my reasoning went:
Logic prevailed. Oh, he still wanted the 3 TI, because game mags say it can run at a squillion fps @ 1600x1200x32, but we did manage to establish that the noticable benefit would be zero, because he doesn't have a monitor that can handle that.
I'd advise anyone else thinking of buying a high end graphics card to do this calculation. Unless you've got a 1600x1200 @ 80fps monitor, what the heck do you need a GeForce 3 or 4 TI for? Don't spend money "future proofing": all you're doing is paying a premium on hardware that will be a lot cheaper when you do find yourself needing it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
How can you say video is just a niche?
You've seen all the 'old' home videos in popular culture?
The concept of filming someone's birthday, setting up the projector, and boring the grandma with an hour of dull footage?
It's even easier today with digital camcorders, iMacs, and DVD-Rs
I mean, who's buying half a million iMacs if not people who want to make DVDs?
GPL Deconstructed
Hey, at least they're making SOME progress. I've got a 10+ year old SGI Indigo2 at home, and it still does smoother 3D than my modern Windows XP box.
From the text under the picture:
Microsoft staffers spent a long time hand carving this imposing statue of BillG at the entrance to WinHEC. Based on Native American folklore from the Northwest apparently it wards off government lawyers.
*grin* Those guys are quite funny, methinks.
With a couple of Macs, some X10 modules, some deft AppleScripting, and the proper cables, I've got my whole house behaving like a well-oiled machine.
The only thing that separates me from true techie nirvana is a TiVo that, out of the box, will let me connect it via a Cat-5 cable to my LAN at home so I'd have the option of programming it/managing it with a web interface. I love my TiVo, but I hate how tedious it is to use the remote to do that stuff when I could be using a mouse and keyboard.
Being able to archive shows to a computer via Ethernet would be nice as well, but I'm really hurting for a more efficient way to bend the TiVo to my will.
~Philly
...since, at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, the only guy able to easily get connected to a WiFi access point and use the public wireless network that had been set up was using.... gasp... a PowerBook!
So says Jerry Pournelle, anyway:
"I have tried to get an Orinoco Wireless WiFi (Allchin pronounced it "Wiffy" at least seven times in his market department written presentation) and I can't get it to work with Windows 2000. Alex hasn't managed with Windows XP. No one else in the press section has connected to the Internet with their 802.11 cloud. Allchin couldn't connect to Wiffy. But Peter has connected to the Internet with the same card with his PowerBook == as Peter says, with Apple everything is either easy or impossible. Using the Orinoco card with his PowerBook was easy. With Windows 200o so far it has been impossible... (But that eventually worked see below.)"
"I have managed to get on the Internet. The local network is WINHWC2002. Yesterday it was WinHEC2002. It is case sensitive. Except that Peter's Apple didn't have that problem. He got on yesterday and he's still on today, in a hall that no one else can get on because of very weak signals. Astonishing."
~Philly
Let's say he pays $150 for the 2mx now, and $150 for the 4ti later. He could also pay $300 for the 4ti now (these are hypothetical numbers, they don't make 4ti for iMacs :( ), spend the same amount of money, *and* have the go-jillion FPS now. Just a thought.
Maybe he didn't have the extra 75 dollars? Maybe he DOESN'T play Wolfenstien? There are PLENTY of games out that run fine on the 2MX400. How about Unreal Countrstrike??? It's still popular. So is Q3A. The only reason you could need that big graphics card is so you CAN run games like those and so you CAN spend 50 bucks on that game (instead of doing like I do and wait until they hit the bargin bin). Not everyone has a Slashdot Editors budget for hardware. Also, I can see most everything just fine at 640x480 as well. Sure, I like running the higher resolution as well but the game CAN be played well at 640x480. ALso, for someone who only plays games occasionally, it just costs way to much to buy one of these hot video cards.
Something I think game devlopers have forgotten lately is how to make a game fun. Now it seems all they and the hardcore gamers care about is eye candy. Sure, looking at these things will make your jaw drop, but who care how pretty it is....is it fun? To me, no. The games that center on deathmatching are no fun for me to play occasionally because there are so many players who have more time then I do and thus are much better then I ever will be. I am not saying that they should make it easy to play. I want to be challenged, but to depend on lightening quick reflexes is too much. I respect those who are real good at deathmatches as much as I respect athletes. I also believe there are some people, like myself, who will never be good enough to do well at the game. Just like i will never be as good as Michael Jordan. But to have fun in these games you have to be that good and it feel terrible to get killed every 2 minutes. If I want to feel like that I can just go and try to play basketball. Then I would get the same feeling.
I enjoy games that help you use your brain. Games like Roller Coaster Tycoon and The Sims challenge you to use your brain to be good at them. Quake, Wolfenstien and the upcoming Doom 3 while they would be fun enough to me in one player mode, just would not be fun at all in deathmatching. Sure they do challenge your brain in some ways, but after that, it's mostly quick reflexes and how quick you can move yer stick. Some say games like Starcraft are like this, and they are, to a point, but one can also win with stragtegy. That's where they differ.
Gorkman
It's quite a nice coincidence that tomshardware just had this article
I think it'll show you that if you're buying a new computer, and want to play the latest games at a decent resolution and framerate, a 2 MX just isn't sufficient. Of course my definitions of decent may differ from yours, but I don't think 1024x768 is unreasonable.
This is hardly anything new. IRIX has been using OpenGL and/or IrisGL for everything since... a long time ago. OpenGL isn't just for 3D fancy pants games, you know. Also, DirectFB harnesses 3D acceleration of several video cards through the Linux framebuffer to draw its 2D interface. Alas, Microsoft is going to once again claim that they're the first ones ever to use a real graphics library to draw the user interface.
A solution to the problem with music today
Go look at some of those same benchmarks, particularly for newer games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The GF2MX400 64M barely runs the game adequately at 1024x768. And that's just average frame rate - what kills you are the spikes where the framerate drops through the floor.
And in all likelihood this is just because of crappy coding. Look at games like Grand Theft Auto 3 on the PlayStation 2. They're pushing more polys than the average PC game, with what's already an outdated graphics system and a 300MHz processor with 8K--yes, EIGHT kilobytes--of data cache. On the PC the developers get the latest graphics cards and high end machines, then grudgingly give a little thought at the end of the project toward making it run on something sane.
Odds are that you'll see Return to Castle Wolfenstein ported to a console like the PS2 or Game Cube and it will run faster than it does on the PC and require a factor of four less memory.
A GeForce 2 MX is still a real beast, BTW. It's better than what's in a PS2 in many ways. But while the PS2 coders are going nuts with that hardware, people are sneering down their noses at the GeForce 2 MX. That's a laughable situation. 3D has gotten so fast in recent years that no one knows what to do with it. In all honesty, even the power of Voodoo 2 era cards is rarely, rarely maxed out. Developers just write some half-assed OpenGL or Direct3D renderer and then blame the graphics card, not even looking at their code and realizing that it takes hundreds or thousands of cycles to process a single triangle--or even a vertex--on the CPU side.
Oh, I should have warned fanboys up front to cover their eyes before reading this, so their little worlds aren't shattered.
Thank god! People in the beowulf community were worried for a second there there might be no reason to release even faster CPUs with even better pipelining and faster FPUs! Microsoft is what makes Linux clusters possible -- they're the insurance behind Moore's law.
Sorry, I make (part of) my living off of the Wintel conspiracy fallout building Linux & FreeBSD clusters. Just think, you can be DIV-Xing 2 live tv streams at once and watching another on a regular linux box these days thanks to the relatively cheap mid range CPUs being sold these days! WOOT!
-- Math.
"Package tours are God's way of teaching Japanese tourists about current events." -- me paraphrasing Ambrose Bierce after JP tourists arrive in Bethlehem recently, completely unaware.
Some really definitive industry standards for 3D graphics hardware and software. Standards that are not controlled by any one company and that are not bogged down with patents and cross-licensing. I nominate OpenGL 2.0 (-:
Do you have links to benchmarks? Sure, you can't run it with all of the detail sliders pushed to the max, but then, if the game is fun Eye Candy should not matter right??? Also, the Geforce 2 MX isn't THAT old. I have run just about everything (in one player mode) just fine. Sure I might have had to lower the resolution and maybe reduce a slider or two, but I have gotten them to work. Of course I have heard even the top Nvidia card has problems with some games. At what point do we blame the hardware and another blame the developer for writing bloated code? I know that games are the toughest programs to write, but with the maddening schedules these guys face, it's a wonder that things aren't running even worse! Are we relying too much on hardware acceleration to fix the bloated code? I won't believe that you can't run even wolfenstien on a 2 MX400 at a acceptable, less detailed level.
Gorkman
It kinda sucks. Apple goes and revives DPS as DPDF, and drastically changes the underlying nature of the display engine of a consumer PC. They have OpenGL and accelerated graphics as part of the core, available to desktop apps and the window manager alike. No tedious driver install. No weird compatibility issues.
Microsoft goes it, and everyone goes bonkers, like its something new. It is new, in a sense, because Apple is just far off everyone's radar.
Now if Apple can just get all the bugs worked out, needed features added, and documentation brought up to date by the time Microsoft rolls out the 1.0... here's hoping.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
24 bit true colour is 24 bits per pixel, viz 8 bits per channel (RGB). While extra depth on top of this can be used for doing things like alpha channels, IMHO, there's not much need for even more colour depth. I wish I had the notes from my first year remote sensing, but I recall that 24bpp is pretty close to what the human eye can discriminate anyway. We haven't received an office PC at work these last 3-4 years that *hasn't* had a pretty good 24bpp 2D card (certainly not an issue when we buy the most crummy monitors we can get away with).
The only reason I can think of having more channels is so that the windowing can be done on the video card, complete with lots of translucent overlays. Sheesh... as if tasteful textured pastel email stationery in Outhouse wasn't bad enough... roll on the floral decoupage desktop.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
My work PC has a TNT2 M64. It runs Unreal Tournament just fine, thank you very much. My home has a Geforce2 MX, now that's what I call a fire-breather.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
We could say that, or we could say what I actually said, which was that the 3 (not 4) TI costs 2.5x the cost of the 2MX now, so if he buys it when it's dropped to the price of the 2MX, he saves money. We could also look at the fact that if he does it my way, he gets a spare and very usable 2MX to re-use. Further, we could understand the proposition that he can't see the jillion fps now. It's utterly irrelevant.
Just a thought.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I never really thought of John Carmac as being a bad coder, thanks for the info. That quake 3 engine must really suck. I guess the developers at Raven are just plum stupid and got suckered like tons of other game developers.
Your're missing the point, Mr. Sarcastic. The Quake 3 engine is just the core rendering (and networking) engine. You can make it fast or slow depending on what you do with it. And, as no one outside of the game industry ever seems to realize, 90% of the code in a game has nothing to do with rendering.
joe,
ok... fair enough.
Amazing magic tricks