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.

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?

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

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:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Back up and erase the "it." in "it.slashdot.org" to make it go away.

Re:It's called Y-Windows

[Osty]

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.

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 /

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.

hahaha

[TechnologyX]

"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.