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

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.

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...