Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
Looks good for your age..
Wow! This makes me jealous... I wish my Powerbook running OS X could do thi.... Oh.... wait....
One of the first orders of business is to "fix busted stuff," as Blythe put it. These items include no more blue-screens (hard crashes) caused by the graphics driver, and moving more processing into what's known as user mode.
They're calling this thing WGF (Windows Graphics Foundation). Perhaps instead of blue GPF's it can generate pretty pink Windows General Faults.
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?
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
Even if this comes from Microsoft, this is pretty amazing stuff. The OS-level ability to use the 3D acceleration features of the card by more than one application at a time may prove to be as important to future computing as the ability to create 2D windows at the OS level. What *should* be more amazing is the response of the open-source community. I think we should all unite in an effort toward a new advanced graphics architecture. Maybe this is something IBM or SGI could reasonably invest in.
samrolken
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...
0 1 - just my two bits
When was the word 'innovation' used? I can't find it. But since we're on the topic, it is interesting that despite MS being a monopoly, they're still doing major work on their upcoming OS. But... no, we'd rather talk about their OS taking a big step towards (possibly even past) what Apple has done.
"Derp de derp."
The difference is that one is a "suggestion" while the other is a company actually getting off their asses and implementing it system-wide. Where is that happening in OSS right now?
I've been saying this since Longhorn's features were announced, Linux desktops will be severely behind if they don't hurry up and move into the modern age that Longhorn and future versions of OS X are competing in. But no, we're still stuck with deskop emulators hacked on top of an ancient X protocol server with no unified development API. Hell, not even a way to install and uninstall things, because it's not really a seamless desktop but a cludging-together of 20 different projects in order to emulate a desktop operating system instead of actually being one.
Back up and erase the "it." in "it.slashdot.org" to make it go away.
1.) Typing "M$" doesn't make you clever or witty.
2.) NT isn't based on DOS at all. Nobody knows what you're talking about there.
3.) Select HTML format next time.
4.) This technology is not "unimpressive." Only to elitist Slashdot snobs who think XFCE is still a cool idea. The rest of the world wants to move to a modern, 3D-based compositing architecture. Where is that happening in Linux? 2006 is just a year and a half away. Well?
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.
"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.
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.
http://brandonbloom.name
Does anybody notice that most of the computing industry would be redefined according to Longhorn?
Now I know they need to build something really different, but are all these differences really worth the hassle?
Maybe it's just me tired of hearing about software that won't be in use for another 3-5 years as if it's the best thing since sliced bread...
Blogging because I can...
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.
Yes, Aqua is one mega-gigantic compositing engine. The power of that shouldn't be underestimated, but I'd expect Longhorn to be able to do that fine. However, Quartz 2D is also a complete vector rasterizing engine, implemented (I assume, it'd be stupid if not) in AltiVec. Why use a GPU when you have multiple vector processors on a G5? (With oodles of L2 and L3 cache to eat on). FYI, writing vector graphics code with AltiVec is very yummy. If you look at the Quartz 2D API, there are no direct compositing functions; it's all vector-graphics. You can take pixmaps and composite them together (using the 'over' operator). Although I guess when they added support for the PDF transparent imaging model (part of PDF 1.4/OS X 10.3), they added support for transfer modes of vector graphics/pixmaps; I haven't looked into that.
As for icons, it's a heck of a lot easier to 'paint' an icon with pixels than to define a drawing with shapes and gradients. Also, Tiger is going to support 256x256 icons (!). IRIX's window manager (forgot the name) had vector icons. No biggie :P
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.
Tiger supports a resolution-independent user interface. With Cocoa based on the PDF imaging model, where every coordinate is represented with floats (including mouse position, which kicks in when you have a graphics tablet), it's very easy to scale everything (and rotate! NSView supports arbitrary rotation of views, and all further drawing in the view will be rotated as well).
It doesn't seem that the Tiger release notes are online yet... perhaps I should shut up.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
"One of the first orders of business is to "fix busted stuff," as Blythe put it. These items include no more blue-screens (hard crashes) caused by the graphics driver"
Yeah, that just pushed Longhorn's release back to around, oh, 2020.
Slashdot sucks