Slashdot Mirror
Windows 8 Graphics: Microsoft Has Hardware-Accelerated Everything
MrSeb writes "Microsoft has detailed the extensive changes made to the Windows 8 graphics subsystem and DirectX 11.1. In short, everything in Windows 8 is hardware accelerated, and as a result its text, 2D, and 3D performance will blow Windows 7 away. DirectX 11.1 has also received a significant overhaul that should result in faster and more efficient games and applications. The bulk of the graphics changes in Windows 8 pertain to hardware acceleration for simple, typographically-rich Metro-style apps. In Windows 8, the rendering speed of text and simple shapes has been massively increased across the board: Title and heading text renders 336% faster than Windows 7; Lines render 184% faster; Rectangles render 438% faster; and so on. The rendering of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image files has also been improved in Windows 8, mostly by expanding SIMD usage. In one demo, Windows 8 decodes and renders 64 JPEGs in 4.38 seconds, while Windows 7 performs the same task in 7.28 seconds. Amongst a few changes to DirectX, the most significant feature in DX 11.1 is the new, simplified, unified Direct3D 11.1 API, which finally brings together the many API offshoots that MS has implemented in recent years."
I bet it also crashes much much faster!!
It renders 450% faster, with shiny 3D shadowing, halo and light effects.
but I have a fairly modest PC and I couldn't tell you the last time I said "Man, I wish I could render these 64 JPEGs in 4 seconds instead of this lousy 7." As far as I'm concerned, text and image rendering hasn't noticeably changed in 10+ years. But, I suppose you have to have something to make up for alienating your userbase with an interface designed for a machine it's not running.
no it isn't :-P
maybe your machine isn't hardware accelerated enough.
So, "typographically rich" is the new buzzword, yes?
It's ugly. I really want to like it, but metro's big colored blocks feel like a step back on a desktop. I have four screens, several feet away from me, I don't want to touch them. I suspect that once its released the first thing that will be done is the "back to the desktop and start menu" hack. And yes, I know this has been done, but still. Its ugly.
Over the years I've knocked Microsoft quite a bit. But I have to say that after 2 years of using Windows 7 I am still happily pleased. I've had one crash with blue screen of death. And very few problems outside of trying to run iTunes.
So let's be a bit fair. Heck, Windows 7 crashed less than my OS X experience of the same amount of time. Not saying it's perfect. But on decent hardware with good drivers, it's pretty darn good. And a lot better than anything Microsoft did in the past.
Here's to hoping they've got their driver-related ducks in a row... methinks they don't... at least not for everything. So while one person is getting sunburned eyes from the speed of the Metro interface, there are a few others who watch their computers implode in a steaming pile of pastel shit.
In other words... I have reservations about how well this will work, and since this is Microsoft... You'll get full hardware acceleration in Windows 9.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
LOL! thanks AC!
Software has dramatically outpaced hardware over the last decade. The lowest end PCs available for purchase can easily run Windows 7, especially if given a few extra gigs of RAM (by far the cheapest component) or given an SSD (by far the slowest component).
End users will never, ever notice this speed because I've never waited for Windows 7 to render text. Ever.
By all means, software speedups are more than welcome and it's good that Microsoft have avoided the typical bloat that many have suspect Intel pushes, but the most important battlefields by far for Windows 8 acceptance will be stability, ease of use, compatibility with legacy applications and hardware support.
Stability is in doubt if there's big changes, which there looks like there will be.
Ease of use... Metro has been copping a lot of flak from the technical user camp, but we don't know what Joe User will think of it yet. In any event, it's a lot of retraining, which is not a good sign.
Legacy application and hardware support will probably be equal to Windows 7, with a loss in application support and a gain in hardware support.
TL;DR: Well done, but I hope this isn't *all* Microsoft have when it comes to Windows 8.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
As side benefit you computer double as heater as soon as it turned on.
last year?
In Gnome,(Meacity) and other xwindow managers use of composite extentions and other stuff has been long and painful, full of fuck ups.
Something tells me pain for windows users has just began!
There's plenty of sections like e.g. the one about memory utilization where the author tells about various situations the devs have been benchmarking and why, but then ends bluntly with "Measuring memory usage across many types of apps and these various scenarios has helped us further optimize DirectX and the display drivers." without actually describing how or what they did. There is similarly no mention whatsoever about the devs improving performance for GDI-based applications; all they talk about is DirectX and/or Metro. With regards to e.g. "Improving geometry rendering performance" we find this gem: "For Windows 8, our improvements in this area have primarily focused on delivering high-performance implementations of HTML5 Canvas and SVG technologies for use in Metro style apps, and webpages viewed with Internet Explorer 10." which to me seems like saying that non-Metro applications won't really see any benefit from this at all. I may be interpreting it wrong, I admit, but it's hard to say without any more details.
To be fair, a Commodore 64 could render the Metro interface at a reasonable speed. The advantage of changing to an interface that looks like it is from the 80s or 90s is that you don't have to push around a lot of pixels or do fancy 3D tricks to make it work.
When they finally retire the old non-Metro UI and just have the full-screen interface, I wonder if they will rename the product from Microsoft Windows to Microsoft Window. The tagline: there can be only one (program onscreen).
The only application that runs painfully slowly on my Windows machine is Office 2010 (try Word with track changes enabled). The other stuff is actually quite snappy. Is this another case of MS modifying Windows to fix Office?
Faster to fall to viruses, worms, trojans, etc?
might restore your faith in windows crashing.
Jesus, these initial comments bore the hell out of me.
Here's the way I see it: Microsoft has finally gotten off their asses and recognized that efficiency really does matter when dealing with power efficient mobile GPU's. Given that Metro's ethos is stark simplicity, it'll be entertaining to watch how developers exploit the new capabilities. If the result is silky smooth navigation in nearly all apps, that'll be a big win. If the result is a rebirth of gradients, glows, glass, and other crap, I'll be pretty disappointed.
Hats off to Microsoft for focusing not just on Metro speed, but speed for all apps.
What? Boob jobs now run Windows?
Are you trying to imply rendering things in less time than before and more efficiently with a GPU produces more heat than the previous method of using more time to render the same thing less efficiently on the CPU? You might wish to rethink that.
Those areas aren't really where hardware acceleration is important. We've got overpowered CPUs with cores just waiting for jobs.
Why would I care if text renders in 100 microseconds or 300? There has always been some 2D acceleration for text and scrolling and such. Not everything has to be a video game with graphical effects.
As for DirectX 11.1, just fuck off. Very few games even bother to overlay a few DirectX 10 or 11 effects for those who qualify. No, they use DirectX 9, because Microsoft has alienated previous versions of Windows (and the consoles use DX9 too of course)
A boring, crippled user interface with a seriously insulting attempt to lock people into their application store. THAT is what I see in WIndows 8. I very much despise it and I will actively fight against it.
...but can I turn that off?
Sooo, by integrating over each Windows iteration, supposedly x% faster than the previous, is Windows 8 1000% faster than Windows 3.1?
Will Metro run on my Commodore PC 20-III?
I'm pretty sure an erase background message filling a solid block of colour will also be substantially (437%?) faster than rendering a translucent gradient texture filled rectangle. Aero is some what hardware accelerated, but it certainly isn't operation 'free'.
making up for everything they promised and didn't deliver with longhorn....
except for a new filesystem...
The post fails to mention if old GDI+ apps are accelerated too? (In Vista they were, but not in W7)
> Here, 1,000 times faster than its predecesor!
> Yeah! Yeah! Ugh, ugh!! [imitating a monkey scream]
> 1,000 times in this, 800 times in that.
> Yeah! Yeah!
etc.
[[Possible future Balmer speach]]
What really worries me (apart from being Windows) is power consumption... would it be 1,000 time higher too?
that no-one will use the DirectX 11.1, since consoles don't.
No, thank you AC!
they claimed they did this in windows 7, but it turns out that minimising windows and so on can make audio programmes skip.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Here's to hoping they've got their driver-related ducks in a row... methinks they don't... at least not for everything. So while one person is getting sunburned eyes from the speed of the Metro interface, there are a few others who watch their computers implode in a steaming pile of pastel shit.
In other words... I have reservations about how well this will work, and since this is Microsoft... You'll get full hardware acceleration in Windows 9.
Well, the pre-release is available to try, and millions are doing so, I have faith in Slashdot that if there were any reports about crashing issues we would have been hearing about it :)
A GPU is till a CPU. Either your intel chip will render the text (which involves font files/ glyps/ floating point math), or your Nvidia GPU will, which has specifica hardware instructions optmized for the tasks which rendering text needs.
So really, I can see why offloading rendering text to GPU makes sense.
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
I remember them doing something similar in Windows 95. Of course, back then it was 2D graphics accelerators rather than 3D...
Why do you think we still use CPU? GPU core can't stop if it started thread, it can only ignore result on early return. Neither it do branch prediction or efficient caching. Basically through into it big data or small data - if the size is not hardcoded it will do the same amount of work. Simplifying it somehow you can say It recalculate whole screen buffer to change a single pixel.
The only thing made by Micro$oft that wouldn't suck is a vacuum cleaner.
Because it is a good OS. This isn't the only place they've increased speed. Cakewalk tried out Sonar X1 (their top flight digital audio workstation product) on 8 and found an across the board speed improvement. Not a recompile or something that used new special 8 features, just the code they have out now running on 8.
The technical types have done good work on it. It looks like they were just able to make it faster, more efficient and all that kind of jazz, and do so without increasing hardware requirements. Wonderful. What's more, they made it so it could run tablet and phone apps, which is cool if you find an app you like and want it on the desktop.
Unfortunately marketing got involved and said "We have to use desktops to drive sales of the tablets nobody wants! Make it use a tablet interface even though that sucks for desktop use!"
So we have a good OS, with a shitty UI. Oh well. Personally, it doesn't bother me much. I'll just replace the UI. I imagine Stardock will make a good set of tools to make it look good (they've already released a beta start menu tool) and Classic Shell already has Windows 8 support. So no problems for me.
It more annoys me at work. What I can guarantee will happen is people will get it either because they want to try it or because they get a new computer, they'll hate the changes, demand 7 back (which we'll give them) and then never want to move from 7, ever, because they'll decide it is "The last good OS."
I'm sure the MS programmers are pretty bitter at the marketing heads right now fucking up what really is quite a good set of technical improvements.
As far as I know, OS X has used the GPU to render everything for several years. So how does Windows 8 compare? Is this another example of Windows playing catch-up?
Didn't Mac OS X have this years ago?
Next, people will be trying to sell me bottled water.
Apple's Wild New Patent Covers TV & Advanced 5D Technology -
http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2012/07/apples-wild-new-patent-covers-tv-advanced-5d-technology.html [patentlyapple.com]
Twenty five more patents were just granted to Apple that blow past Wii, Move, and Kinect which will all be instantly rendered obsolete the moment these patents appear as Apple 4D and 5D hardware.
http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2012/07/apples-25-granted-patents-include-apple-tv-future-id-app.html
Could this be why Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all now fear Apple TV?
Samsung get your hardware and software copiers ready, you know you have nothing to fear.
Quote
“They copied all they could follow,
But they couldn’t copy my mind.
“So I left ‘em sweatin’ and schemin’,
a year and a half behind”
Too bad only string theorists are ever going to use those extra dimensions.
I'm using Customer Preview 8250 right now to build the windows port of my software.
It is so much faster and more responsive than any windows I've ever used before.
Please Please Please put the start menu back. You can keep your overlay mode; I don't care, just make it work like every other version of windows out there.
last year?
Possibly. FFMPEG also has an astonishingly fase decoder and encoder, much faster than libJPEG. I suspect it doesn't decode all features properly, but it is very, very fast. I still can't figure out how to get in to be able to decode JPEGs usin it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
...be any faster than what it is now, due to this complete hardware acceleration?
Part of what went wrong with Vista (part) was that they were aiming up the CPU/RAM upgrade curve, and no one upgraded because their computers were already Good Enough to do everything they wanted to do. I can still see the speed differences on the same (decent!) hardware between XP and Win 7 ... Granted Win 7 has a proper Administrator/Sandbox layer so I expect some slowdown but not that much.
So yeah, enough praising MS for this move, they're 7 years late with it.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
i7 CPU uses 40x more energy for scheduling an instruction than on executing it. GPU is more efficient, but the downside is that it's hell to work with.
I can see the potential a productivity increase by at least 200% already.
*writes memo to management*
I will also recommend to turn on the caps lock by default, because I learned that also gives a better experience.
Privacy is terrorism.
I guess the important metric here is how much less time it takes to render, not how much faster the rendering speed is. So 300% "faster" really means that instead of rendering X objects, we can now render X + 3X = 4X objects. Hence, each object is now rendered 75% faster, not 300%.
Great that Microsoft is doing something about the rendering - but would love them to finally, a 20 years or so too late, fix buffering so that windows in the back are updated correctly when an window in front does not. It's just so inelegant.
It is good that they addressed this. I have a visualisation app that doesn't require a decent gpu and the 2d performance dipping to 50% of XP actually sucked.
I wasn't the only one who noticed.
http://www.passmark.com/forum/showthread.php?2300-Low-2D-performance-on-windows-7
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[adding some lower case text to get past slashdot's all-caps filter. i appreciate encouraging people not to use all-caps all the time, which can be annoying. but in this case that is the whole point.]
Ask why AD is so great and you get a load of things that AD does that LDAP, DNS and DHCP don't do, but only because it's only windows that is braindead enough to require it.
I.e. "I want my apps and my config to move with me if I have to work on another computer". NFS mounted home directories on UNIX means that this isn't a problem on those machines. It does it without AD, therefore why implement it?
However, windows wants it all on the C: drive and locally mounted, therefore they have to have this all reconfigured on boot/login. Braindead windows requires it (maybe it doesn't necessarily, but this is the configuration used), and therefore AD has to do it.
So the only reasons why AD is used is because Windows doesn't allow the correct option to work and needs to be worked around.
I just thought I'd point out that the image decoding improvements between Windows 7 and 8 are very much in line with the speedup that libjpeg-turbo gives over vanilla libjpeg. Linux distro X can have the same speedup over Linux distro X-1 by swapping out their libjpeg library.
Getting a bit off topic, but I'll bite: /.) I have the impression that the influence of the current console generation on graphics features is waning, because they can no longer keep up with current gaming PCs.
Games publishers are increasingly using DirectX10 and DirectX11 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_DirectX_11_support). In case of Battlefield 3, DX10 is even a minimum requirement.
Based on other articles and forums (not only on
Of course, this might change with the next console generation. Which will probably support DirectX 11.1 (at least the new XBOX will do it). Then we can have the same discussion again over DirectX13 ;-)
C - the footgun of programming languages
I understand the concept, just don't figure that text rendering should need to be benchmarked, it is the most basic PC display function. (a hint of sarcasm here)
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Really? How do they do that then? Give us the technical details.
Definitely. This is about understanding the strengths and weaknesses of CPUs and GPUs, the overhead needed for offloading to the GPU, and the types of work best done by GPUs.
One niggling point though - GPUs and CPUs are not one and the same. GPUs, CPUs (and DSPs as another example) are microprocessors, all serving specific purposes, named based on this. Even if one managed to build a system with an existing GPU serving as the CPU, it'd be a horrible mess of hacking hardware and software to allow the GPU to take a role for which it is wholly unsuited.
applications don't get direct access.. drivers do. if the drivers clobber things they shouldn't, they can crash the kernel..
Actually, Windows (since Vista) has a more fault-tolerant hybrid driver model for graphics drivers: A "core" part runs in kernel space and the bigger more complicated part runs in user space. If the part of the driver which runs in user mode causes memory corruption, only the user process is affected. This is the major reason why Vista and 7 systems seems more reliable than XP. Microsofts telemetry indicated that poor graphics drivers and overheating and misbehaving graphics cards were *the* major reason for instability of Windows systems.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb188739.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480220.aspx
Windows also can allow the graphics card to re-initialize if it determines that it has faulted or freezes. For a period I was really annoyed about Internet Explorer 9 when I tried it out. It seemed smooth, especially so when I were scrolling up and down (GPU accelerated). But every 5 seconds or so it would pause for just a fraction of a second. Not much, but definitively enough to being annoying. Little did I know that it was actually the nVidia driver that faulted and the Windows graphics system was actually resetting and re-initializing. When I realized that and updated to the latest nVidia driver the problem went away (I still use Chrome; there still is this "feel" to IE9 that isn't quite right - cannot put my finger on it, though).
they can crash the kernel.. just like the unix derivatives in service today.
I don't think that OS X has a similar model - but then again on OS X Apple can tightly control and regression test the limited number of cards and drivers. I have definitively had X crash on me and taking all the apps down with it on more than one occasion - not so much after running Linux mainly under VMWare and Hyper-V.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
This is the kind of thing that would get me to upgrade. If they could have concentrated on stuff like this and applied it to Windows 7 and then called it Windows 8, I would have been happy with the upgrade. But why did they have to "tabletize" Windows 8 at this point, this is what puts me off upgrading.
I really like Windows 8, and in general, I tend to prefer the way it does things on the desktop. I'm on the fence about Metro.. I think its awesome if you have your PC plugged into a TV, the way I do. And, I like the idea of flipping to a full screen view when looking for applications... but, oddly, I find that Ubuntu's latest version does it better.
This is my sig.
Sure it may draw faster but I can load 5 other office programs by the time Metro Mail loads. Maybe uh, work on that.
All this acceleration can only mean one thing - a faster way to render all those flashy ADs to your screen. Without all the bloated flash on most websites, we wouldn't need all this acceleration, in-fact you could probably get by with an old Pentium 100 Mhz PC with a 2MB Trident video card.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
My problem has always been with the eternal boot-up times, especially in consideration of how often the system has to be shut down and restarted for band-aid patches for security. I don't mean the MS advertised boot-up time to the log-in screen. I mean the actual time that it takes the HDD to quit cherchunking so I can actually start to work on something. Yeah I get a log-in screen in 30 seconds, but I can't actually do anything on the system for 2 minutes.
MS's approach to improving boot time seems to be in redefining the term "boot time" rather than actually doing something to speed it up. Speed up text rendering? Really? Gee, thanks.
And how quickly does it kill the battery running 2D rendering through the GPU?
I'm a little confused. Is this a mostly-mobile OS or not?
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This is just amazing! Microsoft has written something which can accelerate my hardware! Those efficient coders in Redmond have done it again. Making the most of our older hardware which would otherwise end up in landfills all over...
Then we can render more than 64 JPEGs at once.
Though I'm all for Linux advocacy and the low-end, it's not been easy to run a basic PC on 512Mb RAM for anything like common usage for a while now. Firefox alone will kill it, and as soon as you're picking and choosing apps which you can run or not, it's not exactly "perfectly fine".
That said, your point is true. Windows 3.11 used to be just fine for office work on a 386 with 4Mb RAM. I could even whack resolutions up to something considered "HD" today. It could do all the same things that most business apps manage today. The thing is that MS (and a lot of the desktop environments, to an extent) lost sight of what the desktop could be. I don't want an intelligent desktop, any more than I want a smart TV.
You know what I want? Fast boot times. Instant window open times. Fast application response. Sensible application control (i.e. just last week I was STILL fighting with an Ubuntu distro that likes to pop up unrelated programs over the top of the program I'm typing a password into and I end up typing my sudo password into a word processor that stole keyboard focus without warning rather than the secure login I was supposed to be typing into - obviously *my* fault for LOOKING DOWN for a fraction of a second...). And nothing that I don't need to be there.
I don't expect HL2 to run like a daemon on a smartphone, but we're not far off. But I do expect my word processor to load quicker than it did in 1990. And I expect my windows to actually minimize/maximise/drag without lag and (if I want) in the most graphically boring way possible (dotted outline boxes, anyone?), so long as it's faster.
There's a real market, I think, for a "business" OS. Locked down to a set of programs that load quickly and do exactly what they need to in a boring interface that needs no resources. As it is, we have businesses trying to shoehorn an operating system designed for games and pretty effects into their networks and then having to deal with the consequences.
Seriously, if I can run Windows 3.11 at LUDICROUS speeds in an emulated environment on a modern PC and get more productivity out of it (if it were for the inconvenience of the software being just-that-old and incompatible), why can't I just have an OS like that? I saw the ship sinking when Active Desktop came along, and it's been slowly sinking ever since - as has relative productivity (i.e. the amount you COULD have got done on a certain specification of PC, compared to the amount you DID get done).
Hell, I've spent literally minutes just staring boot screens, logon screens, hourglasses and everything else just to load up a web browser this morning. It's so bad, I use suspend rather than shutdown by habit now. But still I can't approach the simplicity and productivity that I'd get if someone made LibreOffice work on Windows 3.11, even if I ran it through an emulated environment.
Ofcourse it renders faster if you remove a lot of bling bling.. I like the bling bling of windows 7 and I want to keep it for Windows 8. I HATE the fullscreen metro apps, yes they are excellent for tablets and phones, but oh so bad for regular desktop applications.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
Great story, except that Windows 7 required less memory than Windows Vista... and Windows 8 requires significantly less memory and CPU than Windows 7.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
If Windows 8 is switching much of its computation the the GPU, what affect will that have on battery life? Seems to me it would be reduced as GPUs use a lot of energy to do their thing. Shouldn't this increase in speed be obvious to the users of the many trial releases MS has issued of Win8? I haven't heard any reports that graphics (jpeg) rendering is obviously faster in Win 8 than Win 7. Of course, I haven't been able to read all the hype about the new OS.
In fact, it set up a lot more easily than Windows.
However, I do agree that ten years ago Linux was more a hassle to set up.
Windows does have some advantages over Linux, but Linux is no longer a hassle to set up, far from it.
never mind metro... ;)
how will Battlefield 3 and 4 run on Windows8.
if real performance gains are to be had, this is the first news i have heard of the OS that calls for myself to upgrade. forget business for a moment & lets focus on bleeding edge performance. Things that business & MAC users know nothing of
Kill your TV
Install Firefox on that linux distro of yours, open 30 top websites (as in highest page-view number) in 30 tabs at same time and tell me that your 500mb PC still works snappy afterwards, 4GB DDR3 ram stick can be found for $8 that would be $16 for 8GB, VERY small percentage of average PC price
Microsoft does something positive; Slashdot readers complain.
And in the mean time, Linux still offers no way to draw smooth animations by synchronizing them to vblank. Xsync was supposed to solve that problem 30 years ago, and yet, it still hasn't.
So in this age of computer technology I'm still waing for a system that can keep up with my three finger typing...
Point is, had computers of the 80's had the speed of computers today, the graphics would be at realtime speed.
So why the slowdown? Its simply because as computer technology provided more speed and resources the developers find ways of using it up and sometimes even giving the users less than they had before...sooooo
This graphics speed up is either a de-bloating of Windows of the resources are being taken from elsewhere.
How many hours does it take to load that lightening fast graphics based game?
Maybe I'll switch back to Windows when it can open PDF's natively.
Hello, we want a functional OS, not a glittery fancy trick to impress the natives. C'mon!
Bet you want free housing and food stamps too!
They are bragging about rendering filled rectangles (i.e metro ui) faster?
What they will accelerate is their downfall after Windows 8.
Fuck you Microsoft.
They need to support hardware-accelerated 3D in C# / Xaml metro apps, not just C++ apps. I don't care if they bring back XNA (as in WP7) or if they integrate 3D into Xaml (as they did with Silverlight 5 and WPF 4). Either way, we can't rely on third-party wrappers around old DirectX libraries. It needs to be officially supported and baked into the tools and libraries.
Honestly, XP was stable enough for me, Win 7 seems ok. But that's irrelevant. Linux does what I want it to do, it works the way I want it to work. Windows does not. Mac does not. Period. I love Linux, and not because I hate Windows. I've been using it exclusively on my computer since 1998, and I have no reason to change.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I am really not sure what one should be using to develop Microsoft apps anymore. User32 and GDI32 are deprecated APIs. Winforms is built on top of these APIs. The future of WPF seems uncertain with the killing of Silverlight and the switch to Metro. Plus, I feel that WPF is a very complicated, overly engineered, flawed design.
libjpeg-turbo is BSD-licenced, which makes Microsoft's adoptation of the feature even less surprising.
Don't much care how flipping fast it renders crap if it takes me 10 minutes before I give up and have to watch a video on how to turn the POS off!
Windows h8 has no close button for metro apps FFS, apparently the I, as a user should not be burdened with being allowed to close apps. I mean, what kind of lowest common denominator are they aiming for here?
Metro apps wont allow multitasking, oh nos, more than one app open, my head will explode!
Aero gets removed and we're left with a desktop that looks akin to Windows 3.1. Why? Probably for no other reason than to make traditional desktop apps look as poo as possible compared to metro.
What really grinds my gears is that I like Microsoft (yeah I know, burn the heretic ) and to see them make this hideous chimera of an OS makes me really sad.
I wanted to like it, I downloaded it ran it and about the only thing I liked about it was the new task manager.
So we have an OS who's primary means of input is touch and MS are currently touting hardware accelerated everything. That's great but what device did they derive these fantastic figures from? It wouldn't be a desktop PC would it? You know, the type of device least suited to using touch interfaces.
Move over Windows ME, there's a contender for your crown of scat.
Usually doing something faster DOES indeed mean it being over in less time. I have no idea what other kinds of "faster" you know of.
Example: A 24 hour endurance race ends in 24 hours regardless of how much faster you go. Of course, to be pedantic, thats not strictly true either, I don't know the number but there is actually a milage number that goes with that 24 hours that they'll stop at if its done before then so technically its possible for it to mean less time, but in general the time involved is constant regardless of speed.
Yes, eye rolls are an appropriate response for this comment.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Am I the only person who doesn't give even 1 fuck about how the windows interface and text based stuff looks?
At work I am working.
At home I am playing games.
At work my PC is slow enough already.
At home I want as much of its performance as possible focused on how my games look and how smoothly they run (I don't have $1k every year for a new gfx card so things start to get laggy well before its upgrade time).
I currently just set all of these things to "Best Performance/off" and never think about it again...
What puzzles me is how you pull these "facts" from your ass and believe people will take you seriously.
"TWICE as big as the previous version" Would make sense between NT4, XP, Vista, as there were significant periods of time between them. Vista and 7, 7 and 8? No.
"Windows always needs a crap load of memory just to run" Not really. 7 wouldn't really fly with 512, Vista certainly not, but 1-2GB is more than fine. 8GB? Come on now. Nobody believes you.
"anything before the date of announcement of said latest version is not good enough to run it" Again, this is stubborn, willful ignorance, nor a valid argument.