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Avalon Preview Released for XP

Posted by michael on from the promised-land dept.

CliffH writes "For those that want to play with a preview release of Avalon (the November Community Technology Preview) and the SDK, head on over to this page and download to your heart's delight. It is 261MB+ and is already going slow so be warned."

5 of 341 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So how about.... by Deviate_X · · Score: 4, Informative

    Theres a video demo here:

    Daniel Lehenbauer - Demo of Avalon 3D #
    and here :
    Avalon Layout Basics

    and info here:

    http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel 9.Avalon

  2. Re:Graphics and Avalon... by Thundersnatch · · Score: 5, Informative
    just what you want for the kernel of a server OS, isn't it?

    Why in hell does every Linux fanboy assume that all Windows processes run in kernel mode? Even Windows Explorer on NT4/Win2k/XP/2003 runs in user space, buddy.

    All of this UI stuff wil run in user space, with the exception of the actual video device driver code (which is done for performance). Windows video device drivers that are WHQL certified are typically rock solid and stable for general non-gaming use.

    Anyway, you can run GUI-less windows servers on 2003 today. And even if you do choose to use the GUI shell for administering a Windows server, when you log out, the processes for explorer.exe and pretty much everything else GUI are completely stopped (only GINA, the graphical login prompt, remains). You can verify this with any number of Windows remote administration tools.

    Finally, you can bet that the "eye candy" will be turned off by default on the server versions of longhorn, just as it is on Windows Server 2003 (which uses the same Luna GUI as XP, with almost all the animation/transparency/etc. options turned off).

  3. 3 Pillars of Longhorn by Carnage4Life · · Score: 3, Informative

    Actually the 3 Pillars of Longhorn were Presentation (Avalon), Data (WinFS) and Communication (Indigo).

  4. Re:Avalon vs Quartz by caseih · · Score: 3, Informative

    Avalon is much more advanced than Quartz is currently. Avalon is a vector-based drawing API. Quartz, although it looks smooth, is really bitmapped, although not for long. Quartz will gain true vector capabilities very soon I'm sure, probably before longhorn ships.

  5. Re:Avalon vs Quartz by caseih · · Score: 3, Informative
    While you are right about the API being a path-based and vector-based API, everything is rendered to a bitmap that is composited on the screen. See http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/3368 7

    relevant quote:
    Quartz uses composition, but despite the fact that it also has extensive support for vector drawing, there is a big limitation: there is no vector-level retention - as I understand it the composition is done *after* the rasterization of the vector imagery. The vector support in Mac OS X actually works in pretty much exactly the same way as GDI+ does in current versions of Windows, and is not integrated into the composition engine.

    Compare this with Avalon, which uses vector-level retention as part of its composition model, and can interleave multiple transform and rasterization steps as a result. (It can also retain bitmaps as an optimization, but it always retains vector information too.) This enables transforms to be integrated with the composition engine. Transforms in Quartz are done much more like current versions of Windows handle them - they are dealt with at the level of a drawing context when the application generates its imagery. (At least that's how I've always seen it done. If you can point me at an example that shows transformations at the composition level rather than the drawing level in Quartz, I'd be very interested to see that.)