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

Welcome to the Present

[Oculus Habent]

Mac OS X uses the graphics card heavily for much of its interfaces. All Macs sport at least a Radeon 9200 (Mobility in the iBook G4), and Apple takes advantage of those cards in plenty of apps... note the multi-person video chat layout & details in iChat AV, or the compositing

That's not a knock on Windows - just an aside, really. The consumer graphics of PCs have been steadily improving, and there's little reason to not make use of that power. The only problems could be in the low-end motherboards offering cheap integrated video. Inevitably, some people are left out in the cold. Time to start moving to nForce or Radeon IGP, PCChips!

I wonder if they'll have a cool Genie effect for minimizing... ;)

Re:Welcome to the Present

[mcc]

Making use of the available graphics power just makes sense, and Apple was smart to be the first to realize this. After all, window compositing is something you're going to have to do at some point anyway; why not offload that task onto that part of the hardware that's actually designed to composit things?

But when you step into the realm of "hey, we've got this power-- let's waste it on something!". Then you're doing something really bad. Using pixel shaders to draw drop shadows on semitransparent textured menus or somesuch begins to fall into this territory.

In the first case you're taking the present advantages offered by the hardware and leveraging them to improve the consumer experience. In the second case you're taking advantages offered by your hardware and eliminating them-- removing the power of your 3D hardware (which technically is there for the applications, not the OS, to use) by making sure that the 3D hardware is continually tied up running the particle engine floating around the talking paper clip or Enlightenment logo or whatever. This degrades the potential consumer experience because it means the consumers don't get to use the hardware they paid for, the OS is too busy using it.

The difference between these two situations may be a little bit subtle and a larger bit subjective, but do you see the distinction here? Because given the curve of resource usage their OSes have followed in the past, I kind of doubt Microsoft does...

Re:Welcome to the Present

[bburton]

Look at x.org. Look at what they want to do with switching everything over to OpenGL rendering. I think you might find quite a few simularities between Longhorn, OSX, and x.org. It's the trend, and I think it's a smart desision.

So what if you won't be able to use the windowing system unless you have an accelerated graphics card? Nearly all new(er) computers have graphics acceleration capability. It opens up a WHOLE lot more possibilities with what can be done within the windowing enviroment. PLUS it makes things a whole lot simpler when you only have to worry about one driver (OpenGL for example), for 2D and 3D applications.

Re:Welcome to the Present

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what we call you people? Fucking Luddites

Know what we call people like you? Lusers. Know why? Because it encompasses the word ``user'' and makes it sound like ``loser,'' which fits you to a T. Why don't you just abstain from taking part in discussions like this? You obviously don't have anything intelligent to add; you're just parroting the latest marketing drivel.

I'll break things down into simple terms so that a snot nosed imbecile like yourself can understand them. First and least important, a lot of what secretaries do is very regular. Letters look like this, memos look like that, bind the copier output using some specific color binder for some specific report. The document generation part benefits a lot from being templated. The secretary doesn't need a rendered picture of a three line memo. She can do quite well putting the correct information inside the correct markup. When she has to start producing documents that don't fit well into some category, have a LaTeX guru write the macros, and things are well on their way again. This can be done with a computer a quarter of the power of the current desktops, and that's without straining.

How about instead of paying more for people to learn how to use LaTeX they spend that extra money on, oh, I don't know a Video Card so they can run Microsoft Word.

Do you realize the absurdity of that statement? A medium to high end video card, to mimic the job that was being done with a mechanical typewriter a hundred years ago? Now, it's certainly true that a word processor is much nicer to use than a typewriter, and better in a lot of respects because you can work with the document as a whole and print out the end results instead of doing things a page at a time, but the ``advancements'' Longhorn will make are eye candy. They're non-necessary additions that don't add functionality and increase the burden of running such a program. It's silly to suggest that Word is better than LaTeX for any purpose; it's lunacy to suggest that Longhorn's eye candy is anything but a burden on the end user.

Lastly, if a secretary can learn to handle the mailing list macros in Word, then she can master the much more intuitive LaTeX method.

Increasing the bar for the standard minimum level of technology is just masturbating the computer economy. Microsoft does better when the whole computer business does better, so they're putting this cock ring eye candy into Longhorn to advance levels of production in places the US Government says they're not allowed to go, but the cock shoots eventually, no matter how tight the ring is or how long it's left on, and when it does, a lot of people are going to be hurt by _another_ tech bubble. Stroking the computer industry to false tuminescense is not a good thing in the long run.

Re:Welcome to the Present

[jericho4.0]

"...to mimic the job that was being done with a mechanical typewriter a hundred years ago?"

Fucking Luddite. LaTeX for secretaries is stupid. Computers are getting faster. Software grows to take advantage of it. Passing rendering to the GPU is inevitable, and it would be stupid _not_ to do this.

Re:Welcome to the Present

[Anonymous Coward]

LaTeX for secretaries is stupid.

LaTeX for secretaries is a good idea for the reasons I've already outlined. You didn't come up with any actual arguments to the contrary, so like I said before, stay out of technical discussions until you learn a little.

Computers are getting faster. Software grows to take advantage of it.

This is untrue and would be a stupid rule to follow anyway. If some feature doesn't add to functionality, usability, maintainability, or performance, then it's a no go. Gluing an SVG fractal 3D GUI to an already perfectly usable program/widget doesn't add functionality, usability, maintainability, and it certainly doesn't enhance performance. In fact, the only thing it increases is the eye candy factor, and it does that to the detriment of all the other factors. It's a braindead maneuver that doesn't have computing at its origins. It's a business move.

Passing rendering to the GPU is inevitable, and it would be stupid _not_ to do this.

This is not what Microsoft is doing. Microsoft is inventing[1] unnecessary rendering to meet the specifications of an arbitrarily chosen, unnecessary-for-most-users video card. Doing video encodes on the GPU is intelligent and inevitable. Creating an imaginary problem in order to boost the solution industry to the detriment of most Windows users is dumbassedness at its finest.

Re:Welcome to the Present

[HuguesT]

Personnally I find LaTeX much simpler than any word processor including Word of OpenOffice. The fact is that even full professors or IT managers can't master word well enough to produce consistent fonts and reasonable tables across a whole document.

Re:Welcome to the Present

[A Drake Man]

And there goes the $499 PC right out the window! If they can't skimp on the graphics cards anymore, then it's going to make it harder for the low end to maintain profitability at that point.

Re:Welcome to the Present

[bynary]

"Entry-level" is a relative term. To a hard-core gamer, a Radeon 9200 is an entry-level video card. To your average desktop user, a Radeon 9200 is a high-end video card. A 9200 with 64MB of RAM is hardly an entry-level card for your average email/internet/word processing user. But I guess by the time Longhorn is actually released, entry-level cards will be shipping with 4 GB of DDR4, will be running 2 Ghz cores and run on PCI-whateverthehelltheycomeupwithnext. The fact is that Mac OS X had these "amazing new graphics rendering capabilities" with the release of 10.2 a couple years ago. Apple is still about 5-6 years ahead of Microsoft...

Yeah, but today's high end

[Anonymous Coward]

Will be low-end by the time it actually gets released.

As if windows wasnt slow enough

[TouchOfRed]

I really fail to see how this will be useful, and help productivity. Personally, i dont think an operating system needs to be that fancy. Just like those who use the console now, "back in my day, we had to use 2d interfaces"

Re:As if windows wasnt slow enough

[LincolnQ]

As I've experienced it, having an accelerator render your windows is really very helpful for usability. Rather than having things pop into place, you animate them. You run your animations quickly, so it's not annoying -- but a bit of motion can do several things:
- Draw your eye towards whatever is moving. Your peripheral vision can see something moving better than it can see a sudden pop.
- Give you a better sense of what is happening. If I press Minimize and the window disappears, I sometimes have to go hunting around my screen for where it disappeared to. If it animatedly shrinks, it helps your spatial memory to find it again. Having a decent graphics card to render the shrinking effect makes the transition smooth and nice.

Having a graphics card for your windowing system also allows for reflection, transparency, and other effects like that. I haven't seen a good use for those effects in user interface yet, but I think they could turn out useful.

No biggie.

[stratjakt]

You can get a card today for ~80 bucks that fit the bill. Even PCI models, if you're that far out of the loop. By the time longhorn is released, they'll be commonplace.

Frankly, I can't wait to see this. All that GPU power of my 9800 is basically being wasted 99.99999999% of the time right now.

Lobby

[FiReaNGeL]

Honestly, do we NEED a 3d-accelerated interface? I'm sorry, but the "cute" factor vanish rapidly, and if it's gonna cost me a 200$ video card, I'll pass my turn. So basically, we will be required to buy a 3d card if we want to upgrade past Windows XP?

Anyone else think that Nvidia and ATI might have lobbied aggressively for this? I can't justify this... if it was an option, sure, no problem, but a necessity...

Re:Lobby

[stratjakt]

Oh shut the fuck up. 200 dollars my ass. I seriously am sick to fucking hell of "computar linux exparts" spouting such nonsense. Mod me down, call me a MSFT astoturfer or whatever. I absolutely hate intellectual dishonesty.

A Radeon 9200 is 36 dollars.

And no, you don't need it. Don't buy longhorn.

I don't know if you'd noticed, but you can't buy anything BUT a 3D card new these days. By the time longhorn is out, if you don't have a 3D card with PS2.0 support, that would make your PC about 5 years old. If you want the latest software, sometimes you have to upgrade.

I like the idea of using it for something other than games.

Re:Lobby

[jellomizer]

Guess what things change. Back in the 80s when the Mac was released People said the same thing. Why do you need a GUI Interface where we can get all that we need done in text mode. GUI is only for games and cute apps. Then by the Mid 90s GUI became nessary for most modern computing needs. Besides just allowing ability such as WYSWYG Word Processing. The windowing interface made it common to have multible apps open at the same time where you can see information on one app and the other. Yes Desqview could do that too in text mode but it was difficult to get the data you needed without the resolution. Then you were paying $200 or More just for a card that can do "Ultra High Resulution" 640x480 at 16 colors. Shortly after all the computers needed them there production price went down to match competition.

The same will happen with 3d cards after longhorn is released in some times in the distant future. The prices will go straight down, because there will be more then just 2 that will make a Longhorn compatible Video Card.

I can't justify this... if it was an option, sure, no problem, but a necessity... Nobody is forcing you to upgrade you will not be put in Jail if you use your 8088XT with MS DOS 2.0 with 256k of RAM and a CGA (2D 4 Colors at 320x240, 2 Colors 640x240, 16 color Text Mode) Video card. But honestly as time goes on the system requirements for new systems increase. It is the same for Most Linux Distributions, Mac OS, BSD, Solaris... It happens deal with it.

Is this necessary

[digitalgimpus]

Am I one of the only ones who prefers usability, stability, and performance... to eye candy?

I'd rather it work on an old ATI Rage PRO.

Why?

Simply because that means good performance for modern computing. If the minimum is "latest and greatest"... Ugh.

Nor do I like the idea of upgrading hardware around my OS. If anything I want to upgrade because I need it for my job. Not because of some 3D glitter covered start menu.

Call me crazy... but performance is much more important.

Why doesn't Microsoft invest this effort in security?

If they said getting a new more powerful computer would make me more secure (perhaps some integrated trojan detection... integrated tightly)... yea, I could see that being beneficial.

But do I really need to get new hardware... for eye candy?

Come on Microsoft. Less is more.

Re:Is this necessary

[eV_x]

Let us all not forget that many years ago the video requirements of modern interfaces were substantially different than now. Things must progress and evolve. Interfaces will become heavier on some levels but easier on others, but you can clearly count on the advancements of technology to help OFFLOAD the strain to new devices and components. By Longhorn doing this, my guess is that my CPU will actually get less of a load on most things by making the graphics board do what it does better than a general purpose CPU.

You can't stop evolution simply because you can't keep up or you get comfortable.

I am consistently blown away by people who make comments like this:

"Am I one of the only ones who prefers usability, stability, and performance... to eye candy?"

Do you watch TV? Do you look at magazines? Style is here to stay my good friend. I don't know about you, but I DO care about what my OS looks like. If I wanted my OS to look and feel like a windowless brick room with flickering flourescent lighting, I'll skin it that way myself.

Do you even use modern software? Almost all of it is skinnable. Why do you think that's popular? Because people are bored? No, because modern software is generally an extension of your personality. My guess is yours is like vanilla ice cream.

On top of that, you are CLEARLY in the minority.

A couple scenarios:
Do you drive an old beater for a car because it "does the job"?
Do you live in a tiny room with an integrated flip down bed and sit on the floor to eat because it's a more efficient use of space?
Do you wear burlap clothes because it seems more practical?

I'm sure you talk tough on computer crap, but you probably are wasteful in other areas. People like me DO care. I care about my car having the latest features. I care about my house being more than just a few walls with a ceiling. I care about personality and enjoying what I'm working with and where I live.

"But do I really need to get new hardware... for eye candy?"

Mr. Vanilla: Do you realize that every game id and Valve release sells new hardware? Oh, that's right, you wouldn't know because you're too busy with your CGA graphics board playing pong so you're not forced to "upgrade".

Rock on - now excuse me while I go play my 8-Track.

Big Deal.

[huber]

How is this different from Apples Quartz Extreame or soon to be realeased Core Image? Its not. It the natural evolution of things. While naysayers will shout "idont need this" and " Its not productive" , When you have several CPU Intensive apps open and running, wouldn't it be nice to know that your otherwise unused gpu is taking care of your windowing?

Why spend $200-400 on a new card?

[csoto]

Just plunk down $500 for a Minimac.

Quartz Extreme makes good use of the graphic hardware of any Mac. Many applications use this to their advantage.

Re:Why spend $200-400 on a new card?

[Anonymous Coward]

The "automatic scaling" for old GPUs is fallback to a software implementation of Core Image running on the CPU. This will not be able to support all the realtime effects.

Re: the Mac mini, the shaders in the Radeon R2xx cores (8500, 9000, 9100, 9200) simply do not have the capabilities needed by Core Image, such as support for floating point data everywhere, sufficiently large shader program lengths, etc. etc. etc. So Apple did in fact just release a Mac which won't be able to do hardware accelerated Core Image. If I had to guess I'd guess they did so primarily due to cost; probably the cheapest CI compatible GPU is the FX 5200 and it's significantly more expensive than the Radeon 9200.

Re:Funny

[stratjakt]

Yeah, a Radeon 9200 costs what, 36 dollars according to pricewatch.

THOSE BASTARDS!

I'm sure lots of people will switch to linux to save that 44 bucks. Even though they'll probably have to buy new wireless cards, modems, or whatever other miscellaneous hardware linux doesn't support.

Re:How silly

[EvilSporkMan]

Well, eye candy may or may not be bad in OSX - if I had the money to waste, I'd get a Mac and dual boot with Linux. As far as KDE goes, you may be able to turn this "eye candy" off, and KDE isn't forced on you if you just want to use Linux.

Re:How silly

[HermanAB]

and 640kB memory should be enough...

It is called 'progress' and it is not necessarily bad. You can keep your green on black Hercules graphics adaptor, but I'll go for the modern colour, thanks.

Boosting performance on Windows

[parvenu74]

Slightly OT, but something that would also help to boost performance in Windows Server would be a mode in which the Graphical environment/window server is never even loaded, similar to unix/linux command line mode.

Re:Boosting performance on Windows

[Omniscientist]

This is a definite truth, however to the best of my knowledge, people who specialize and are only familiar with server OS's like Windows heavily rely on being able to click around than knowing what to type. Kinda like Windows' user base, but to a lesser degree since your average Windows network admin probably knows a bit more than you average Windows user.

It would definitely make Windows look alot better in that market if they did in fact have a purely command line mode just like unix/linux which you could do everything that the GUI allows you to do. My guess is that this would just confuse people who are used to using the old fashioned Windows Server OS's though.

Re:Boosting performance on Windows

[myov]

Basic tools. I've yet to completely admin a Win 2K server from a console. Everything I've seen is based on the MMC console.

While MS may supply some tools, third parties don't. Especially, some in-house VB app.

Realistically, unloading the gui isn't much of an option.

Anyone look at the source?

[Transcendent]

An afterthought to an earlier post.... did anyone notice we're fretting over an artice from The Inquirer???

role of console and 2d

[SanityInAnarchy]

Maybe eventually someone will have a 3d UI that is significantly easier to use than 2d, and is even really necessary for some apps.

I mean, who would have thought that graphics would make email so much easier? But it does.

For now, I have to laugh at the fact that NT people have to reboot to use the "recovery console", which is barely multitasking, if at all!

So, I don't worry that it will be pointless, or that it will waste cycles. Think about the speed of Firefox vs the speed of Links. Eventually the speed will be tuned and I will have some apps that I can't live without the 3d.

For now, my concern is that there be an easy fallback. With Linux, it's CTRL+ALT+F1. Windows already has 2d in the kernel.

I suspect there won't be a fallback at all!

Getting rid of pixel units

[captaineo]

This is a very good thing, if only because it will force developers to think in terms of arbitrary units (like "inches on the screen") as opposed to hard-coding pixel dimensions into their software*. Recent high-resolution monitors have exposed painful problems of hard-coded pixel interfaces - like text that becomes virtually unreadable at 3840x2160.

As a side benefit, this move towards a more vector-oriented display architecture means anti-aliasing will be easy to perform. Imagine dragging a window around with sub-pixel precision, and having the window contents and edges anti-aliased with a high-quality filter.

Not to knock Apple, but from what I have heard, Microsoft's implementation goes further in making the graphics API completely resolution-independent.

* and if you still want to use bitmaps for certain things, go right ahead, just let the graphics card re-size them to the appropriate pixel dimensions with high-quality filtering.

Some people actually use the GPU too.

[BFaucet]

I'm a computer animaton/FX guy and I need every little bit of speed out of my GPU... in many cases my GPU ends up holding me back, not my CPU. I don't really need menus and windows to be taking video RAM either.

I wish MS would work to make computers cheaper and more a part of everybody's life instead of trying to make companies spend $1000 to upgrade each system so they can continue to use Office (on top of the already unbelievable MS Office tax.)

Apple...

[vought]

will sell a ton of Mac Minis in two years. When people realize they can't run the latest and greatest, they will have to buy a new machine to keep up with the Joneses.

Given the creeping resource requirements of Longhorn, you'll need something relatively powerful to run it. Powerful usually means big and loud. The mini suports quartz extreme with it's 32MB Radeon, but $500.00 mass-manufactured PCs definitely don't, Buy a new $500.00 PC today and you'll get shared DRAM video memory, unsuitable for Longhorn's graphics model.

When Longhorn finally ships, you get to spend money and time upgrading your video card and buying more RAM - or you can just buy a new machine ready to run, virus-free, and which requires only an upfront investment in a keyboard and mouse. Everyone has a TV - and the Mac mini connects to a TV out of the box.

And do you really think even a midrange PC today will be capable of running any decent video editing app in Longhorn?

Now remember, these people already have monitors, keyboards, and mice. The mini comes with none of these. Just replace your old, decrepit PC with a Mac mini.

Apple is introducing this new idea and expression of the home computer now, because it gives them time to gradually inform the market, generate buzz, and work up to a similar condition to what we se with the iPod today.

They will learn from this first, good product, and make something even better. The iMac was the first example of this thinking; iPod was the most successful. Start with only the best ideas and build upon them. Kill the bad ideas quickly. Drop the size, drop the cost. Apple is innovating at hyperspeed, catching up for years lost wandering in the wilderness.

If you're going to spend $500.00 on a new machine so you can run a new OS, what's to keep you from geting one of these Mac Mini things anyway? Especially when you can just hook it to the TV, put it in Simple Finder, and give one to granny for e-mailing pictures of her fancy dog to her friends with fancy dogs?

Just my two cents. Everyone's in the PC business has been secretly that afraid Apple would do this for years now. Now they're left to squeeze their margins even further, remaining at the sole mercy of Microsoft - who appear to be displaying an incredible ability to screw up nearly everything they've touched over the past couple of years.

Command line

[eneville]

Perhaps MS press are confusing UI with OS. The OS is the kernel etc, the UI should make optional use of the graphics cards. Why windows requires a graphics card is beyond me, to an extend OpenBSD can be installed and configured over a serial port, without the requirement of any graphics card beyond what the BIOS will allow the system to boot with. Longhorn is likely to become "long list of requirements". A UI that //requires// highend graphics is likely to be a bad UI. Consider a vital system that looses it's graphics hardware through natural hardware failure and then refuses to load the OS because of a graphics card requirement, sheesh, I won't be running anything important in those conditions.