Windows 8 Graphics: Microsoft Has Hardware-Accelerated Everything 563
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."
Didn't Fedora already use the "faster jpegs" line? (Score:2, Informative)
last year? [fedoraproject.org]
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:crash faster (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Yes but.. (Score:5, Informative)
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 [msdn.com]
Re:crash faster (Score:5, Informative)
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.. (Score:5, Informative)
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 [lifehacker.com]
Re:...typographically-rich Metro-style apps. (Score:5, Informative)
"Typographically rich" just means that the apps actually use the well-established typographic rules that are widely used in print media, and these days also on websites, for their UI. You know, things like the appropriate choice of fonts (serif vs sans serif etc), varying text sizes and styles to visually distinguish different pieces of data, general layout rules etc. As opposed to rendering everything in the same 8pt system font, and using chrome to highlight things.
Here [microsoft.com] are the actual design guidelines that explain it all in more detail.
Re:crash faster (Score:3, Informative)
My Windows 8 RP install crashed itself three days ago, and the install was only two weeks old. Tried a reboot and the system booted up already logged in to my user account (and this was a full reboot, BIOS screen and all) and I couldn't get past the login screen to log out of it properly. Tried rebooting again and the system wouldn't boot to Windows 8 at all. It went into a self-repair mechanism and couldn't fix the issue. I also couldn't "refresh" or "reset" the installation. Only solution was a full reformat of the hard disk.
Thank goodness it was a dual-boot machine to start with and I could still boot into XP-64 (that was on a separate internal drive). Was able to save some configuration files but lost a few actual files. So I guess it was a disk directory issue.
Re:Maybe it's just me (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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:Maybe it's just me (Score:2, Informative)
Taking a long time to open a directory sounds like the behaviour caused by one of the more well-known antivirus programs (don't recall which one though). Try disabling or uninstalling whatever you're using and see if it changes.
Re:crash faster (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Maybe it's just me (Score:4, Informative)
I used to work with GDI/GDI+ a lot for rendering custom UI controls back in the WinXP days. When Vista was introduced, which lacked hardware-accellerated GDI/GDI+, performance dropped dramatically to the point of being unusable in some cases. Win7 fixed the situation, but it demonstrated the impact simple rendering speed can have.
~63ms per JPG versus ~110ms might make the difference between a smooth running UI and one that feels choppy and slugish.
Re:Light on actual details (Score:5, Informative)
no, you're not interpreting it wrong.. non-Metro stuff will not see any of these improvements.
Ars did a much better piece [arstechnica.com] about it.
There's a nice technical blog about how bad WPF is for rendering stuff [wordpress.com], and how Silverlight is even worse (most Silverlight rendering is done via the CPU). Fun reading.
Re:Worse by far. Ask why AD is used. (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
Re:Maybe it's just me (Score:4, Informative)
That's because Mac OS X has been using the GPU for window and desktop rendering since about 2002 through Quartz Extreme, Core Graphics, and Core Image.
Microsoft is very late to this party.
Re:Maybe it's just me (Score:4, Informative)
QuartzGL is the latest version of Apple's support for 2D GPU acceleration, which first showed up in Snow Leopard. However, if the apps you're using are using Quartz 2D (a.k.a. Core Graphics) to render their windows, or use Core Image for displaying images, they've been GPU accelerated for years. Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2) introduced Quartz Extreme, which put the Quartz Compositer (think: window server) on the GPU, and started using the GPU for Core Graphics.
That was in 2002.
Windows enhanced fault-tolerant display drivers (Score:5, Informative)
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 [microsoft.com]
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480220.aspx [microsoft.com]
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.
Re:crash faster (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Maybe it's just me (Score:4, Informative)
That's because Mac OS X has been using the GPU for window and desktop rendering since about 2002 through Quartz Extreme, Core Graphics, and Core Image.
Microsoft is very late to this party.
By "very late" you mean "about one year before OSX" in Windows XP in 2001 with GDI+?
Re:Fighting the Wrong Battlefield (Score:5, Informative)
but I hope this isn't *all* Microsoft have when it comes to Windows 8.
Of course not.
Dramatically faster install, reinstall speeds along with new refresh/reset functions for fast snapshotting and reverting to snapshots.
Dramatically faster boot/sleep/hybernate/resume/shutdown times.
New "Storage Spaces", a dynamic pooled storage feature.
Built in Hyper-V virtualization support.
New syncing and roaming support (use same login on different machines, get the same settings, metro apps, and data).
Integrated SkyDrive cloud storage support.
Integrated USB3.0 support
New faster/better networking support for mobile devices, including support for metered access and monitoring and smart network switching (won't download updates on metered connection, for example).
Better memory use via resusing redundant memory, smaller working set, smaller set of active services running.
Improved integrated security and malware protection, as well as more and better protections throughout the OS (better address randomization, etc).
Improved multi-file-copy/move experience through the UI, including improved conflict resolution.
Native support for creating/mounting .iso and .vhd files in Windows Explorer
More and better language and keyboard support.
Improved PowerShell scripting support.
New "File History" feature (easier to use, more "Time Machine"-like file backups and restores)
Improved Task Manager and resource monitoring in general.
Re:Maybe it's just me (Score:4, Informative)
No, he's right. GDI+ does not make effective use of the GPU.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/gdigdi_move_over_microsoft_introduces_direct2d [maximumpc.com]
[Microsoft's Thomas Olson] points out that GDI/GDI+ use software rendering for tasks that modern GPUs can now perform...
Quartz Extreme has supported GPU acceleration since OS X 10.2, released in 2002.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Compositor [wikipedia.org]