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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.
Using Windows as a way to sell more hardware!
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.
That's just plain stupid. Grandpa & Grandma want to check their email and pics of the grandkids, why on earth should they require a Radeon MegaXP293823-XtremeSLI+ to do that? I hope there's an option to disable all that cycle-wasting crud or MS may be shooting itself in the foot: how many offices will spend a few hundred dollars on individual video cards just to upgrade the OS? What about those machines with onboard video (ala Dell?)
Trolling is a art,
"KDE: Gets 5000% performance out of your graphics card by using our patented 'It Doesn't Use Fucking Pixel Shaders Just To Display A Fucking Menu' technology!"
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I've used Windows since 3.0. I'm a Windows (.Net) developer. And I agree that the gee-whiz factor will be great. Animations, depth to menus... it'll be gorgeous.
But... It doesn't matter how fast computers get, Windows Explorer Shell always seems to become less snappy, even on fresh installs. XP made the start menu slower than ever as it retrieves nonessential metadata on the shortcuts. Myriad Shell extensions, over time, bring the Explorer UI to a crawl.
Sexy is great, but I have to use it every day. It's just not worth making the UI dog even worse.
Is this going to be another case of where Microsoft tries to copy Apple, but misses the point?
Mac OS X 10.2 introduced "Quartz Extreme", which uses your graphics card to composite your screen. This meant that dragging windows around now required almost no CPU power at all. In 10.3, they introduced several 3-D effects to enhance the interface - most notably a rotating cube when you switch users.
There are two key points that Microsoft seems to be missing, though:
* Mac OS X looks exactly the same if you don't have a powerful enough graphics card, and screen redrawing is not too slow. Having a graphics card just makes the system more responsive because the CPU is doing less of the work.
* The system degrades gracefully - if you don't have a powerful enough graphics card or run out of video RAM, certain 3D transitions may be skipped. But everything will still function, and everything will look the same.
It's too early to tell, but it is starting to sound like Microsoft may be creating a new interface that requires a super graphics card, leaving those with only cheap integrated video with a completely different interface. To me that sounds like a recipe for tech support hell - novice users won't understand why their screen doesn't look like someone else's.
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...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Grandpa & Grandma will probably be dead by the time Longhorn comes out.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
If you have a REALLY crap graphics card, Windows longhorn will automatically switch to text adventure mode.
You have opened a window.
Above you you see the Titlebar, it has a Close button.
There is lots of text on the window, looking closely, it appears to say 'slashdot'.
You are likely to be eaten by a Grue.
>_
liqbase