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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.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
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).
-Billco, Fnarg.com