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."

Comments

Re:Yes but..

[Anonymous Coward]

You're using Windows with four screens? Are you using a different window manager or some additional software to manage windows?

Windows 8 actually has quite significant multi-screen improvements built in, see the blog post http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/21/enhancing-windows-8-for-multiple-monitors.aspx

Re:crash faster

[epyT-R]

applications don't get direct access.. drivers do. if the drivers clobber things they shouldn't, they can crash the kernel.. just like the unix derivatives in service today.

Re:Yes but..

[billcopc]

Windows 7 added a few simple keyboard shortcuts to quickly move windows around and dock them to the left or right half of a monitor. It does the same if you drag a window to the edges of a monitor. I can't speak for the GP, but personally I have not needed a 3rd party window manager since this addition. I can't even remember the software I was using back in the XP days, but it basically did the same thing.

Since most well-behaved Windows apps remember their position on exit, this is just peachy. If they don't, proper alignment is just a few keystrokes away. Combined with the Win+(digit) shortcuts for the first 9 items on the start bar (docked or running apps), I don't even touch the mouse for most of my work.

Here's a list of those shortcuts at Lifehacker

Re:Maybe it's just me

[JasterBobaMereel]

This has very little to do with displaying the image, it has a lot to do with reading the files, and unpacking them both of which hardware acceleration will not help with at all ...?

Almost everything that needs hardware acceleration to be fast enough already has it, everything else it should be irrelevant, except MS is pushing whizzy graphics on Metro apps - you know those annoying animations that people have been complaining about for years .....

It's sad 8 has such a shitty UI

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Worse by far. Ask why AD is used.

[dontclapthrowmoney]

"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.

Yeah it's a real shame windows don't have something that lets your profile roam with you.

- Roaming profiles
- Folder redirection (with or without mandatory profiles)
- Group Policy
- Group Policy preferences (can't remember how I managed without those, now. What's a login script again?)

And probably a bunch of other stuff I missed, that was off the top of my head. And it's click-and-drool to deploy for the most part, and troubleshooting is just right-click-and-drool.

Windows enhanced fault-tolerant display drivers

[benjymouse]

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.