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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."
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?
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.
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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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."
Yes I know you trying to be funny but as an IT consultant for small and midsized businesses, I haven't seen a Windows system totally crash since XP and even then rarely saw any crashes after SP3. For all the haters here on Slashdot, Windows is still by far the best desktop environment available for use in a business setting.
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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 suspect that once its released the first thing that will be done is the "back to the desktop and start menu" hack.
Stardock's Start8 already allows you to boot straight to traditional desktop and recreates the Start-menu as seen on Windows 7. That will be one of the first applications I'll be installing, that's for sure.
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.
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.
Enlighten us, what areas are more important then?
Why would I care if text renders in 100 microseconds or 300?
You may not care, but anyone with a mobile device with a battery will; the less time the machine spends active the more time it can spend in idle which quite obviously results in less heat and power consumption.
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
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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What time does it now take to draw the entire screen blue?
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
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.
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
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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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But it isn't just office. Active directory is much easier to deploy and manage than an assortment of linux servers running ldap, DNS, etc. Business isn't just email, word, and excel. It is about effortless collaboration and communication.
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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).
Your mobile device is going to have graphics capabilities that will matter for this?
Try to find a SINGLE modern GPU that cannot e.g. accelerate Direct2D or DirectWrite. Those have been around for atleast a decade now. So the answer to your question is quite obviously "yes." The functionality that relies on DX11.1 won't be accelerated for now, but it won't take long before the next-generation Intel and AMD - processors will ship with DX11.1 - compatible integrated GPUs at which point even DX11.1 - based acceleration will matter.
A laptop with higher end graphics will use more battery to render your text and generate more heat.
Why do you assume you need a high-end GPU for this?
If you want to be "enlightened" go take a physics course.
I could also suggest computer graphics theory courses to you.
Do you seriously think you're going to be done with it faster because it renders text a few milliseconds faster?
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.
Even if it does somehow benefit you, why should your usage take preference over mine?
You're complaining about performance improvements. That's like complaining about your new car going faster and using less gas than the previous one.
My point was, they are bragging about crap that is of small benefit compared to the negative aspects of Windows 8.
Then you should have complained about that, but no, you complain about increased performance.
just like every single operating system in service today.
There, FTFY.
"due to being improperly configured."
was that during install time when you inserted the Windows install disk instead of SuSE or Redhat? --
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
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.
Right, so when you have wobbly windows under compiz, it totally rendered as usual. SURE! Especially with blur and other 3d effects. All in pseudo 3d, just usual 2d stuff.
Compiz handles rendering the whole window AFTER the window's contents has already been rendered by other subsystems. Compiz has nothing to do with the rendering of the elements inside the window itself, like e.g. in GTK+ - applications GTK+ handles the rendering of the contents. The article in question here, however, talks about rendering those contents and it has nothing to do with compositing, ergo your comparison with compositing managers is pointless.
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...
Not true. Many embedded systems use microkernels that can't do this. The driver can issue DMA requests, but it must call into the microkernel to request some memory for the target or the IOMMU will raise an exception.
It's increasingly easy to implement operating systems where buggy drivers can't trash the entire system now that most consumer CPUs come with an IOMMU. If you're using an nVidia GPU, almost all of the complex logic is actually in userspace. All that the kernel-space driver does is set up a context on the GPU with a command submission buffer mapped into userspace and allocate memory in VRAM or in main memory accessible from the GPU. The card can only DMA to regions registered in the GART, so there's basically nothing a malicious or buggy userspace program can do except trash its own memory and fill the image buffer that he windowing system will composite for its window with nonsense. High end NICs (e.g. infiniband) have also been designed in this way for a long time, because the overhead of going via the kernel was too high.
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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.
You can use Windows as a server? Gosh, next you'll be saying they do phones too.
no, you're not interpreting it wrong.. non-Metro stuff will not see any of these improvements.
Ars did a much better piece about it.
There's a nice technical blog about how bad WPF is for rendering stuff, and how Silverlight is even worse (most Silverlight rendering is done via the CPU). Fun reading.
"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.
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.
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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).
Wow, this is probably the first honest and thoughtful yet believable post I've seen on the tubes actually giving win7 the praise it deserves. I also was running xp at home and linux at work until win7 came out, and now I have it in both places. Just can't justify the "hassle" of setting up and configuring linux - which always takes a lot of time for *me* (maybe not a more leet haxxor) because win7 really does just work in a very non-annoying fashion.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
I use Linux (fedora/ubuntu), OS X (personal rMBP), and Windows (7 64bit ultimate at home, 32bit professional at work).
I have always wanted to "hate" windows, and "love" Linux, and in the past I have wanted to "love" mac os too.
in the past I have had plenty of reasons to hate windows, but by XP sp3, it was less, thoguh now that I am on 7, i actually HATE xp.
I was probably one of the few people that didn't hate Vista. Maybe because i used the 64bit version, I dont know, but it was stable if not particularly spectacular. It got the job done.
Windows 7 is a phenomenon in comparison. Together with the SSD, it just worked. Being able to send movies to my TV with a right click on the file, and without installing anything. Windows 7 just works, and although i do have a dual boot Ubuntu partition on my computer, i rarely use it. My chief annoyance is its inability to read any file systems on USB Mass Storage other than FAT/FAT32, and is the real remaining evilness of MS (forcing manufacturers of devices such as cameras to support FAT and pay their "tax" to MS)
OSX, is pretty, but not necessarily better than 7. It is not more easier either (keyboard shortcuts are more extreme). OSX is just different in my books. It too has some evilness such as the restriction on supporting TRIM only on Apple approved SSDs. It also has in some ways less application support (excluding BSD)
Linux is the OS i prefer to use for development, and also servers. However, I still spend way too much time configuring it than I have time for. When I was younger, and have time, it was fun. These days, I am married, a professional, and simply don't have time.
Have a nice day!
OS X does not use the GPU for font rendering. It renders each character to a texture on the CPU and just composites on the GPU. This was added with Quartz Extreme. X11 also does the same thing via the XRENDER extension, and so does Vista via Direct2D stuff. The MSR paper that I am referring to described how to store the bezier control points on the GPU and then construct the glyph with pixel shaders.
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PowerShell is to administrative shells like the car some 15 year old kid builds in his garage with spare parts from a junkyard is to top-of-the-line race car or luxury car engineering from world leading engineers. It's just not even remotely close to what we get in *nix shells. And all it does is provide you with a CMD + script environment. Everything you can do in it could be done trivially via VBScript or JScript with COM. Microsoft once again instead of embracing technologies just re-invents them and poorly. They could have ported bash and the entire GNU environment with lots of other goodies over to Windows legally and we'd have the best of both worlds, but they instead decided to create some convoluted and terribly designed "competitor." This is similar in many respects to what they do for web browsers. Instead of embracing what we've already created (WebKit is open source, so is V8, WebKit + V8 is almost Chrome, and Microsoft could easily leverage both of these and even contribute back to the community by improving both), they create their own stuff which is years and years behind every other modern browser and which holds the entire industry back because they don't have an insignificant market share. This is the Microsoft way. It needs to stop, now. This is a golden rule, and one of the only rules we adamantly enforce in software engineering: if it isn't broke, don't fix it. More specifically, if something already exists that does what you're doing, use it or improve it. Unless you have a revolutionary approach that is significantly better (demonstrably), such that it is your business value to provide a better implementation, don't ever re-create something that already exists. Microsoft routinely violates this rule. I'm not sure why, maybe because they want to demonstrate to the world that they're still relevant somehow, but instead they end up looking like fucking idiots and pissing everyone off in the process.
When you need to heat your food, do you grab some iron and create an alloy of it to achieve a higher electrical resistance then wire it into your home's grid? No, you buy a stove, because someone already fucking did that. When you need to keep something cool, do you find a gas with a very low boiling point and create a phase-exchange system for moving heat from a small confined and insulated space to a larger heat dump? No, you buy a refrigerator, because someone already fucking did that. When you live 40 miles from work and need to get there today, do you invent an internal combustion engine, refine crude oil to obtain gasoline, invent strong rubber-based inflatable tires, create a mechanism for distributing power from your engine to the wheel assemblies, etc? No, you buy a fucking car or use public transportation, because someone already solved that problem. In all of these cases, you need TO DO SOMETHING, not make something better than what already exists. You don't decide "well I need to use a linux shell in Windows, let me go ahead and completely invent my own shitty version." No, you port the existing open-source implementation to your platform, at the very most. Because someone already fucking did that.