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Windows Longhorn to make Graphics Cards more Important
Renegade334 writes "The Inquirer has a story about MS Longhorn and its need for better than entry level graphics cards. This is due to the WGF (Windows Graphics Foundation) which will merge 2D and 3D graphics operations in one, and 3D menus and interfaces that require atleast Shader 2.0 compliant cards. Supposedly it will really affect the performance of the new Microsoft OS." This has been noted before in the system requirements for Longhorn, but it would seem the full impact is slowly being realized.
IIRC, longhorn installer will check your graphics card (if it's lower than X fps then...) and will enable or disable 3D functions depending on if you've a good or bad graphics card
In short: the "3d mode" it won't be the one available. There will be a much lighter desktop available (somewhat like current XP or something like that, you'll miss all the 3d stuff but...)
No, not 3D interfaces in the way you're thinking. Think of it this way: every window is now an DirectX object. No need for redrawing by an app. Since every window is now a 3D object (one with only one pixel depth), you can do simple things like moving all the maintenance of a windows' DC from the app itself to the OS.
That's what Quartz Extreme does on OS X. This is just Quartz Extreme on PC.
I'm anticipating that a lot of people are going to bitch and moan about how it's pointless eyecandy, but if Microsoft is able to do what Apple has been doing, then it could really add to the UI.
Things like expose and translucent windows can come in amazlingly handy in OS X (I've never found anything quite as useful as transparent terminal windows in OS X allowing me to have code open in one window, and documentation in the window behind it, and look through the code window to read documentation, especially when working with an API your not familiar with).
I think that as 3D accelerated UIs become more common, we'll see even more useful features popping up. It's not like there is any good reason for new computer to have a video card that won't run this, and the type of person who would upgrade would probably either already have a newer videocard anyway.
I just wish this would make it into X, but alas I suspect that it's the sort of thing that might take a while to get properly implemented and supported.
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That is the $64 question isn't it? Can Microsoft learn to make an OS that doesn't slow down massively over time. I just did a fresh install on my one machine that runs XP and its night and day. Over time XP just gets slower and slower. Of course the battle cry for MS defenders is "its the fault of 3rd party drivers and apps". Well, then make freaking OS that doesn't let "3rd party" apps run it into the ground. Why do I even need to use an app's uninstaller? Why by default doesn't XP know exactly how to remove every last bit of registry crap that got shoved in there in the first place? How come it take 10 minutes for the start menu to come up after I've been using the OS for a while? How come many explorer operations still lock up the OS and stop whatever work you doing cold? When will MS make an OS that you can actually multitask on no matter what's going on in the background? MS has a lot of work to do and somehow I get the feeling that they haven't learned their lessons yet.
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Mmm, no. Commodore was the first to really do this. The original Amiga had native graphics capabilties that still aren't available (like multiple resolutions onscreen) in PC hardware.
In the interest of historical accuracy, the Atari 400 and 800, first publicly available in 1979 (six years before the Amiga), allowed mixing multiple resolutions on screen. You built a display list of modes and the hardware interpreted them. You could mix text, graphics, and various resolutions of each. You could also trigger interrupts to occur on a specific display list command.
Okay, cluehammer time:
First, the GPU is the processing unit, the framebuffer is the memory where the bits are stored. Both are involved in any kind of rendering operation, 2D or 3D. The GPU operates on the bits on the framebuffer.
Second, modern graphics devices don't have any dedicated 2D hardware left in them. They all just use their 3D cores to do basic blit operations. Why waste silicon on specialist 2D blitting when you've got a gajillion megapixels of fillrate sitting right there in the 3D core?
Third, you are obviously unaware of how modern shader technology works. If I want to stream down 2D coordinates then I can do that just fine. In fact, shaders don't really care what all the numbers are, they just know that they are getting a certain number of inputs. If you choose to write a shader program that interprets them as coordinates to be transformed, then that's merely the common convention. Heck, I could just stream down 1D coordinates if I wanted to (actually, this is genuinely useful, if the coordinate is time and the shader is computing, say, a particle system). So there is really no inefficiency in using the 3D core to do 2D operations, because I can just transmit the minimum amount of data necessary by means of a suitably chosen shader.