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."
...typographically-rich Metro-style apps. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Maybe it's just me (Score:5, Interesting)
Fighting the Wrong Battlefield (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:crash faster (Score:2, Interesting)
I've seen three Windows 7 crashes - caused by overheating graphics cores, all on the same computer.
Re:crash faster (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Re:Maybe it's just me (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:crash faster (Score:2, Interesting)
Windows is still by far the best desktop environment available for use in a business setting.
Windows is only the "best" desktop environment for business purely because most business use MS Office. Those businesses that DON'T use MS Office (and there a a surprising number, which is increasing with each "improvement" in Office releases), funnily enough would say that Windows is NOT the "best" desktop environment for business.
Re:Seriously, can we give Microsoft some cred... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Fighting the Wrong Battlefield (Score:3, Interesting)
You do realize that the less time the CPU or GPU has to spend doing something the more time it can spend idling, thereby consuming less power and producing less heat, so even if the end-result is not visible to the eye it is still a beneficial effect nevertheless. Especially on mobile devices any improvements to battery-life directly translate to end-user satisfaction and better useability.
I'm not convinced. The Nvidia GPU in my computer is constantly consuming dozens of watts by itself while it sits idle doing nothing. The ATI GPU I had before that was actually worse.
Mobile GPUs have much different characteristics yet still keeping more silicon than necessary lit even if reasonably gated does not seem to me to be worth reduced cost vs any insignificant additional CPU offload during the *small* amount of time actual work is being performed contrasted to cost of normal 2d acceleration with less area lit up.
An analogy is building a power budget or power usage spreadsheet for your home. You count what is always on or what is on for a good amount of time. The microwave uses a kw or more while on but only for a few minutes per day. For most people it is not worth your time to include the Microwave as an item in your budget.
Re:OFFS! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Seriously, can we give Microsoft some cred... (Score:3, Interesting)
Try Windows 8 and you would take back any credit you give them for Windows 7.
Re:Is GDI+ accelerated too? (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Re:Maybe it's just me (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:crash faster (Score:0, Interesting)
One bluescreen in 7 months Windows 7, I must say they are definitely improving. (ran some hardware stresstests after, and found nothing.)
osx for estheticity
linux for diversity
windows for jobsecurity
Seriously though, i'm happy to say that after years of absence (ever since NT4 fased out, to be exact,) a couple of Microsoft based devices are finding their way to my home again. Later than Win{,phone}7 stuff is pretty shiny.
No way near replacing my debian netbook (and desktop macbook) yet though. But my main phone functionality seems to have migrated migrated towards the Phone7.5 device,... out of choice :D
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Re:crash faster (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:crash faster (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:crash faster (Score:2, Interesting)
DNS, LDAP, etc. are available with easy-to-use web-based managment interfaces as appliances, far easier than maintaining Microsoft stuff. But that's the wrong argument to make, because the entire style of computing Active Directory represents is itself obsolete.
Yes, and cloud solutions like Google Apps and Zoho beat anything Microsoft has to offer hands down, both in terms of usability and ease of management. Microsoft knows that their stuff is obsolete, which is why they'll drag you into cloud computing whether you want to or not anyway, all the while keeping a tight grip on your wallet.
Re:Maybe it's just me (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, they have to persuade you to buy into Metro somehow, and how else but saying "man, that old crap we did, how crap! But we did it right this time, look how cool it all is".
ArsTechnica did a much better piece [arstechnica.com] about how its not so much how much better Win8 is, but how much of that goodness is put into Metro apps rather than old desktop apps.
As for WPF, its fine for LoB apps, but TBH those were perfectly catered for with winforms, and winforms were a bit easier to work with - no nasty interfaces, loads of property-laden objects, and really crufty binding expressions in the XAML, Winforms were so simple in comparison and did everything your LoB app wanted, but I guess MS couldn't have sold you the new VS and Blend to work with WPF without saying "man, that old crap we did, how crap! But we did it right this time, look how cool it all is".
Re:crash faster (Score:2, Interesting)
It's surprising to me as well how long it's taken them to do this. Mac OS X has been using GPU acceleration (Quartz Extreme / Core Graphics) since 10.2 in 2002, and really ramped it up in subsequent releases with Core Image and QuartzGL.
Re:crash faster (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:crash faster (Score:2, Interesting)
I read that a lot here. What exactly does "getting stuff done" entail? I get stuff done all day long on my Windows 7 notebook.
Re:crash faster (Score:4, Interesting)
I cut my teeth on Irix back in the 90's, so on my DOS machines, I had an extensive set of Pascal and C utilities to replicate some of that Unix functionality. Perl and PHP have replaced many of those old scraps, but I think part of the problem is that I'm a classic programmer. I expect the shell to handle the occasional loop or conditional statement with some degree of nimbleness, particularly when managing directories. In my mind, it's a half-step down from proper scripting.
Powershell to me feels nonsensical. I like the concept on paper, but it becomes far too verbose to do even basic things like launching Explorer on a folder. I think of it more as a weird GUI-less VB.Net dialect than a proper shell. If I wanted to write proper code, I'd fire up MSVC and go to town...