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.

Comments

Re:Great, but.

[bogie]

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.

Re:How silly

[tc]

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.