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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."
So, "typographically rich" is the new buzzword, yes?
I've thought that. A few months ago I spend a day or two trying to get GIFs to compress as quickly as possible, trying to get it in under 50milliseconds for a project I was working on. I didn't succeed, but any speedup is welcome to me.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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Well then you can't blame the software for a hardware failure. I was running my original Windows 7 installation until a few days ago, when I decided to start fresh. 3 years without any significant problems, it's been the smoothest experience so far. I distinctly remember the day it launched, my coworkers asked about it, and they had to ask twice when they heard me speak the words "Windows 7 is fucking awesome". This, coming from a guy running a heavily-modified Gentoo-KDE workstation, bragging about 300-day uptime with XP relegated to a tiny VM on a side monitor.
3 years later, well, I still think Windows 7 is great. Does what I expect from Windows, nothing more, nothing less. Runs fast, supports all my hardware, sleeps/resumes without a hitch, uptime is dependent on whether I care to install monthly updates. Pretty much my only gripe is I wish the default shell were Bash instead of CMD (and Cygwin still sucks).
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I use a moderately powerful Mac and I cannot once think of a situation where when I downloaded my camera I had performance issues scrolling through photos in iPhoto. Hell when I use iMovie I can scroll through video with my mouse cursor while experiencing no lag or stutters. My Windows 7 dual-boot on the other hand sometimes inexplicably takes upwards of half a minute to actually display the contents of a directory after I try to open. This is the main reason I do most of my "life stuff" in Mac OS X.
A bad driver will crash any non-microkernel OS. Win7 is actually better than average since at least most video driver crashes are recoverable (though it can still be effectively unusable in practice if the driver consistently crashes a few seconds after it's [re]started).
That said, I've seen zero issues with BSODs since I've started going for drivers to Windows Update first, and only falling back to downloading & installing them directly if WU can't find them. So far the only piece of hardware for which I needed to manually download a driver is my network printer.
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.
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The post fails to mention if old GDI+ apps are accelerated too? (In Vista they were, but not in W7)
GDI/GDI+ is not accelerated at all in Vista. Windows 7 reintroduced some of the acceleration in GDI (mostly blitting if I recall correctly).
Yes, PowerShell is very useful especially if you are managing a large environment, well worth the investment in learning. I forced myself to only use PowerShell for last six months and it is good. Some simple bash commands like ls work in PowerShell. Having said that I did install ActiveState Perl today because I missed Perl and someone gave me a screwed up data file that needed a good cleanup. Could have parsed it in PowerShell, but Perl is so easy...
Most likely it will improve it. In general, running tasks on the GPU uses less power than on the CPU. It's almost always more power-efficient to use dedicated silicon than general purpose, and while a GPU is a general-purpose processor these days it's still heavily optimised for this kind of task, whereas the CPU is not.
It's also worth noting that MS has had a long time to tune this. The original implementation of GPU-accelerated font rendering was done by MSR about a decade ago. In the time it's taken them to transfer the technology from research to a product, academic research projects have spun out companies, had them bought by MS, and had their products integrated into the MS lineup. This is a pretty good case study of what's wrong with Microsoft's interaction with its research division.
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I don't understand. From what I can see the "selling point" of Windows 8 is metro, is touch screen, is the new UI. You, and many others, I'm sure, will be instantly disabling these features?
There isn't really much to disable, I'll just use the traditional desktop with one or another Start-menu replacement, that's all.
Guess what, I don't blame your for this, I just wonder why you don't choose an operating system to fit your needs, whether it's sticking with Windows 7 or moving elsewhere. Is it a good idea to "upgrade" and then spend time and effort working around those upgrades to have what you had before?
I want the performance-improvements and increased battery-life offered by Windows 8, that's more-or-less the whole reason for me to upgrade, though being able to better support family and friends with Windows 8 is a good side-effect. Since I bought a new laptop at the beginning of June I am eligible for the discounted price of Windows 8 Pro, I'll have already saved that money just by skipping one Subway-meal and as such the price is not really a deterrent. I will be sticking with Windows 7 on my desktop, though, as it is not eligible for this discount.
As for "moving elsewhere": that is unfortunately not a suitable solution for my use-cases.