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.'"

Comments

Windowing

[ChozCunningham]

It would be nice to see some of the Linux GUI developers implement a fully vector-based scalable windowing system. This would put linux one visual step ahead of MS, as they are half-way there with the Longhorn GDI replacement.

An intelligent GUI would be settable to any virtual resilution, with elements that are fully scalable, from icons to "system" fonts. This is an inevitable feature on the desktop, and I wonder if any proposals are in the works.

Sick of the Longhorn hype yet?

[Cid Highwind]

I know I am! With the hype machine running flat-out this far before the launch date, Longhorn is starting to sound like Microsoft's version of Copland...

Re:Cool!

[goMac2500]

To answer your reply, Mac OS X does indeed route drawing through the graphics card. It has since 10.2. http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartzextreme /