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Longhorn's Windows Graphics Foundation Examined
Matt J writes "Dave Salvator at ExtremeTech goes over some of the graphics designs for Longhorn. 'David Blythe of the DirectX development team gave a very interesting talk about the upcoming 3D graphics architecture in Longhorn, the next major revision of Windows. Called Windows Graphics Foundation (WGF), this new architecture will usher in some major changes to how 3D graphics operations get handled by Longhorn. These changes extend well beyond Longhorn's Avalon technology, which will render the Windows Desktop using a GPU's 3D graphics processing power rather than the traditional 2D blitter. WGF will instead define the core 3D operations themselves.'"
Actually, and correct me if I'm wrong, anyone, Mac OS X doesn't do anything like this. OS X only simulates 3D graphics using 2D methods.
I am by no means a M$ fan, but what they're talking about should blow your PowerBook away.
** A Sketch a Week **
http://www.sketchplease.com
Y-Windows. A replacement for X that is fully hardware-accelerated and can upgrade its own drivers without a restart.
If people want to beat Microsoft with this technology, Y is the place to go and help out.
Back up and erase the "it." in "it.slashdot.org" to make it go away.
As an MS intern working in the Avalon (the presentation layer of Longhorn) group (with no particular love for MS), I just gotta say that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Not only is what we're doing incredibly powerful, the ease at which one can use the technology is just amazing. You can sit down and start writing your own Longhorn applications in literally 5 minutes. A hello world program with the "hello world" in gigantic text spinning and getting smaller and larger is a 5 line program.
It's really quite amazing.
"It's just like OSX's Aqua, rendering the GUI in the graphics card and all...?"
No. Aqua doesn't render the GUI in the graphics card at all. It does, however, use the graphics card as a high-speed composition engine.
Aqua is also bitmap based. Despite what many have said, OS X icons are just bitmaps, as are the buttons and other controls. That means that they don't scale very well - just like the widgets in Windows XP.
With Longhorn, everything is vectorized. You'll be able to adjust the DPI of your display and all of the controls will automatically update to match it. For example, you could have a 300dpi display and then adjust the widget size so you can still read the text.
People with UXGA 14" notebook displays know all about this. Many choose to run their display at a lower, non-native resolution because the text is too small otherwise. This isn't the best solution. With Longhorn, they'll be able to run at full native resolution and adjust the text size (and the size of the titlebars, icons, buttons, scrollbars, and everything else) to make everything usable. Plus, they get the benifits of high resolution: clear, crisp text and objects.
glitz and Cairo, to name 2 related efforts.
Um, OSS already has:
1) An X server that does transparency and double-buffering;
2) An (actually, 2) OpenGL-accelerated canvas;
3) A window manager that uses said canvas.
Sure, they are still "in progress" releases, but you can actually download them and try them out, which is way more than can be said for Longhorn.
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It sounds like he is talking about how the 3d surface is created inside the computer.
It's kind of like the difference between a photograph and a painting. Both can represent a 3d world projected onto a 2d surface. The painter must fake the 3d effect by hand (like a traditional GUI appearing 3d). The photographer doesn't have to do this since he is simply taking a snapshot of an already 3d world (like rendering a real 3d scene as a GUI). To get a photograph of a different angle, you just reposition the camera. A painter, on the other hand, has to basically start from scratch.
Old computer games sometimes appeared 3d even though they were represented internally as 2d objects (static character images with the shadows manually drawn in for example). Current games represent the world internally as a 3d environment that is projected onto the plane of the camera. It's computationally more expensive, but much more flexible. At first I'm sure it'll be a more complicated way of making things look basically the same as they do now. But I imagine people will find useful applications for it as time goes on.
OK, after commenting, I went back and read the article. There's a couple major improvements over the current Windows:
+ It sounds like they are getting rid of the old single-threaded event model, which was brought over for Win3 compatibility. (No more GUI locks while Windows probes your CD-ROM, etc.)
+ The processing will be moved to user mode as much as possible (ie, no more "GUI in the Kernel")
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Do you honestly think Microsoft wouldn't put preemptive multitasking in a new version of Windows? That would be feature (and usefulness) suicide.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
> It would be nice to see some of the Linux GUI developers implement a fully vector-based scalable windowing system. . .
. .
> An intelligent GUI would be settable to any virtual resilution, with elements that are fully scalable. .
Someone tried it once, it was called NeWS. But all the X-heads couldn't grasp why it was better.
They're here: http://freedesktop.org/~keithp/screenshots/
Utter nonsense. Microsoft tells you all the things they're doing for Longhorn way ahead of time. So far in advance that some of those features get pushed back to later releases when they realize they can't get it down. And Longhorn is getting released when? 2006 at earliest?
How much of what was announced at Apple's WWDC for Tiger (due out in 2005) did you know about ahead of time? Apple handed out preview releases with features no one knew they were working on. Apple's website only covers the features that are stable and useable in that preview release. Meaning there's more stuff which only WWDC 2004 members heard about and aren't allowed to talk about.
Quartz Extreme is Mac OS 10.2 technology. (And when did you first hear about that?) 10.3 brought Quartz 2D on OpenGL. It lets you use parts of Quartz 2D inside OpenGL canvases. At last year's WWDC they said they needed fragment and vertex shading support to get all the widgets implemented in OpenGL. As a result, Quartz 2D on OpenGL isn't something that happens automatically on Panther. You could utilize Quartz 2D objects like fonts inside your own OpenGL programs. So what will 10.4 bring? Suffice to say that Apple is not standing still. Complete 3D acceleration of the GUI has pretty clearly been in their roadmap. They've had a head start over Microsoft and are likely to stay ahead.
well, you've really done your research..
For starters, MS didn't invent the start menu, it was Apple, all MS did was market it in a way that disillusioned people who didn't do much research thought that it Microsofts idea
Now.. where to start: http://wwws.sun.com/software/looking_glass/
Composite/Xdamage: One thing that has kept us behind Microsoft for a while graphics wise. These allow real transparencies. they are 1 month off..
Enlightenment 17: This has amazing graphics already (try entrance.. it works already), and blows away anything I have ever seen. The people who code enlightenment are also well known as technical geniuses and are excellent at optimisation, so they can do high quality graphics VERY fast, and very efficiently.
Dashboard: While Microsoft is bragging about their integrated search technologies, unknown to many, this is already available in linux too.. http://www.nat.org/dashboard . In fact, Microsoft stole the idea from that...
Full hardware accellerated window: The accelleration system is being changed now, and I'm guessing that within 2 Xorg releases, there will be nothing left that isn't accellerated.
"DirectX shading" Let me ruin your disillusions about the magical directx.. Its behind, its always been behind, and whatever it can do, opengl can do a lot easier.
XUL: Our new XAML like thing.. Its being developed for Mozilla. Do you even know what that is???
And about your comment about no desktops using the new features.. do more research!!! You'll notice that everyone has been migrating to SVG type graphics already and cairo is the most likely method that will be used to accellerate them. You obviously haven't noticed this though.. Because I bet you haven't touched CVS though, so have no idea whats really going on.
Now, heres the thing you prove you haven't done your research on.. What about stuff like SElinux that Linux has but Microsoft doesn't eh. Microsoft is bragging about the new stack smashing protection in SP2, but just about every Nix distro/type has had it for years.
And what about stuff like gdesklets and superkaramba?? I'm not sure exactly, but I think that we beat Microsoft on those things...
Come back after you've tried Entrance from E17.. http://xcomputerman.com/pages/entrance.html . Those kind of effects already I can honestly say beat longhorns by a long shot (at least what I've seen). After you tried that.. You'll get a taste for the future.
And about integration, you have no idea about dbus, shared-mime-info, etc obviously, because that stuff is already making a massive difference integration wise..
It's sort of happening already.
SVG in GNOME and KDE. That's scalable vector graphics at the application level. Some themes already use SVG for icons and window decorations.
CAIRO offers scalable vector graphics at the X11 level. Nice pics here. Hardware acceleration through Xrender.
Windows are getting alpha channels thanks to XDamage, XFixes and XComposite. Means we'll finally start seeing similar effects to what you get with Aqua on MacOS X.
All the bits are coming together. If you're willing to play at the bleeding edge then you can see some of these effects today.
Can't disagree with you on items 1 through 3. The guy before you was a pratt.
But regarding item 4: that stuff is happening in Linux. Look at freedesktop.org for projects like DRI, CAIRO, XRender, XFixes, XDamage, XComposite, and so on. It might not happen before 2006 but it's not a neglected or unwanted feature in Linux land.
You can get a blue screen of death screensaver from http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/bluescr eensaver.shtml . Always a hoot to have running in your lunch hour.
Nothing costs nothing
KEY: "summary of what it says (paraphrase, not an actual quote)" - what it means - what it means from a perhaps slightly biased POV
1. "Talk at Microsoft's Meltdown conference: DX Futures"
2. "Talked about Longhorn's 'Windows Graphics Foundation'" - quote from powerpoint: 'WGF is the "next Direct3D"' - a 3d architecture for both games and for the OS (and maybe for non-rendering tasks)
3. "Unifying vertex/pixel shaders; support multiplexing by multiple apps" - Microsoft is going to continue driving the process of specifying what next generation hardware's feature sets should be (only natural, since Talisman and Fahrenheit were such succesful designs ).
4. "remove fixed-function pipeline features; everything must be done by shaders" - Because obviously everyone wants to write shaders themselves for everything, even in the simple cases! Yes, please make me look up the Phong lighting formula every time I write a throwaway 3d app! Actually, the article doesn't make clear but the presentation above does that they're continuing to support the legacy DirectX interfaces, and improving support for OpenGL, so at least you can use those interfaces for fixed-function support. But the ppt above does seem to say that the hardware won't implement fixed-function stuff (which makes perfect sense--the drivers can supply an equivalent shader), and it states that a high-level shading language "will be the only methodology for Windows Graphics Foundation", with an example showing a shader iterating over multiple lights and computing the results itself.
5. "no more caps bits (capability bits)" - Hey, it's yet another of the things that OpenGL got right all along. Not sure what prevents someone from accessing a legacy D3D API and getting at the caps bits there, but at least there won't be any new ones.
6. "stability; if we're using 3d graphics hardware for basic desktop rendering, it's got to be super stable, and when it crashes, it needs to be able to reset trivially without the machine going down." - the ppt says the new architecture design is trying to reduce driver complexity. I am extremely doubtful about this.
Actually, it's Quartz Extreme that renders the GUI via the GPU. Core Image is more of an add-on to that, applying filters and transformations using the GPU as well. Quartz Extreme has been around since Jaguar, and Core Image will appear in Tiger.
e me /
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartzextr
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/core.html
For years I've wished linux had vector based desktop so I could have a 3d scroll wheel embedded in irix window frames. You make the wheel turn by dragging over it with the mouse, and all icons in a window grow or shrink smoothly. I also like the way icons would shoot animated rays out for a few seconds after clicking to indicate the program was loading.
"No 3D card," you say?
According to this. The G5 either comes with a NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra or a ATI RADEON 9600 XT.
According to this the iMac has either a NVIDIA GeForce4 MX or a NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra built in.
According to this the PowerBook G4 has either a NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 or a ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 built in.
According to this the iBook G4 has an ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 built-in.
According to this the eMac has an ATI Radeon 9200.
If I'm not mistaken, that shows that ALL Apple's sytems include 3D cards. Spread your FUD somewhere else.
Surely you realize that in order to render into 256 or 16 colors, the OS has to do an enormous amount of *extra* work to convert from the ordinary colorspace? Of course you do. You're trolling. Sigh.
"Vector processors" do not accelerate the same kind of vectors that are involved in "vector graphics."
Actually they do. I'm doing a lot of this work right now (still working on it damnit). Tons of matrix multiplication (multiplying the spline matrix by the geometry matrix, and then the parameter matrix), parameter modification (translating the sample values into the desired domain), etc. Vector processors are perfectly suited for vector graphics.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
1) How is the OSS stuff any more vaporware than Longhorn? It's "in progress" just like Longhorn is "in progress." Or do you have a release version of Longhorn that nobody else does?
2) The new graphics stuff isn't in the PDC beta. The new UI was shown only in Bill G's keynote --- it was stripped from the 4051 build given to attendees. The new OSS graphics stuff is actually available for download.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...