Longhorn's Windows Graphics Foundation Examined

Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday July 30, 2004 @04:42PM from the closer-looks dept.

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.'"

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Re:Wow by Anonymous Coward · 2004-07-30 17:14 · Score: 5, Informative

Back up and erase the "it." in "it.slashdot.org" to make it go away.
Re:It's called Y-Windows by Osty · 2004-07-30 17:23 · Score: 5, Informative

Remember, scalable bitmaps and alpha blending are already fully available on Mac (natively) and Win (with add-ons).

It's native in Windows, as well, since Windows 2000. Just because you need a separate application to enable it in apps that don't specifically support the Windows 2000+-specific extensions doesn't mean it's not native to the system. See the alpha-blended fade-in/out effects on menus, for example. Microsoft simply chose to go with an understated application (and yet still gets blasted for "annoying" menu animations), while Apple went over the top.