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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!!
no it isn't :-P
maybe your machine isn't hardware accelerated enough.
If you've been watching Microsoft at all in the last 20 years, and expected anything but ugly, then you haven't been paying attention.
A good part of the reason OSX is considered 'beautiful' is because people are comparing it to Windows. Yeah I just insulted Microsoft and Apple fanboys, but it's true.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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).
I can put lipstick on this pig 8 times faster than I can put it on this woman. You want that, right?
So, "typographically rich" is the new buzzword, yes?
Give us $1 million or WE WILL USE BLOCK CAPS EVERYWHERE.
That is the generally-accepted definition of the word "faster".
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Were you trying to create a website, where YouTube videos are converted to animated GIFs on the fly? ;-)