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

Like what's planned for the X windows system?

[mr_tenor]

using a GPU's 3D graphics processing power rather than the traditional 2D blitter.

Is this like Keith's Getting X Off The Hardware plans, where he suggests that having your xserver running on top of openGL instead of having to talk to all this messy hardware stuff will make it nicer and faster?

Linux will have this kind of stuff way before long

[auzy]

We have cairo.. same kind of thing, and people are modifying stuff to implement it everywhere.. Theres also many other technologies to make up everything that Microsofts new one will do (the difference is though that we are much closer to getting a stable version)
http://www.freedesktop.org/Cairo/Home

Just dont take all of Microsofts noise too seriously, just be aware that by 2006, linux will have completely equivilent technologies (in many cases we already do), and just cause we dont make much noise about it, dont think that they dont exist, or aren't planned for the near future.

Honestly, the stuff which I have seen for longhorn so far hasn't been mindblowingly amazing, and are really just things where they are trying to catch up to MAC OS X, or linux

Re:Windowing

[ChozCunningham]

The most interesting part of MS's graphics model is that it is supposedly a 100% new engine, yet it maintains compatability with existing applications. And they clame that it will degrade gracefully to older hardware, as well. I am inclined to believe it will do a pretty good job of that, since of all the things I hate about windows, it's backwards compatability is relatively excellent. I've played games and used dos and Win 3.11 applications under 200 and XP that I really never expected to just "click and go".

It is time for the "Z" Windowing system standard. A fully SVG compliant, and "X" compliant vector based (but bitmap friendly, via texture mapping) system. Who's down?

OSX is alead, but that's not all

[SnprBoB86]

If you read (and fully understood) the article, you would realize that a fully hardware accelerated windowing system is not all that Microsoft promises with this new stuff.

The other stuff I see as being BIG are the changes to DirectX such as removing a lot of the fixed function pipeline features. They are pushing the GPU to be more generalized which is a good thing.

Microsoft is really hyping up Longhorn and none of the meat of Avalon has made it into the technical previews. Judging by the Ctrl+Alt+Del animations, the smooth color fades in Explorer, the few existing vector graphics, the other random programmer art in the technical previews, Avalon is going to be IMPRESSIVE.

Whether you like MS or not (which you don't, this is slashdot), they have the programming and graphical resources to pull this off in a very big way.