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."
Maybe it's just me (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Maybe it's just me (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
I'm sure this only applies to the explorer image file support. other applications need to use these resources in order to take advantage.. sorry, you're still stuck writing some simd assembly to make that 50ms timelimit.
Re:Maybe it's just me (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Maybe it's just me (Score:5, Insightful)
Suppose you've just downloaded a couple of hundred images from your camera-- Wouldn't it be nice if you could quickly scroll through the images and decide which ones are worth keeping, and which are not? Or perhaps you've photographed some library books, page by page, and it occurs to you that one particular article is more immediately useful, and you don't remember if that's IMG_209--IMG_215, or IMG312-IMG_334. If Windows renders the images quickly enough, it's very simple to flip through the images. If not, you'll be waiting for the images to load.
Maybe it's a pdf from archive.org that needs thumbing through.
Re:Maybe it's just me (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
I must say that between my Windows machine (which is the more powerful one) and my Macbook pro. Media related tasks are always (or "feel") faster on my Macbook Pro. If I see how fluent I can edit movies or preview my edits then it is a whole other experience then on windows.
It still amazes me that I can see certain things in realtime on my macbook while on my window pc I mostly need to "re
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.
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)
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: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]
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 .....
Re: (Score:3)
I thought the disk IO was worth thousands of times more costly in operations like these
A lot of people thought that. Then SSDs came along and made a lot of these assumptions incorrect. Developers for most major operating systems are currently optimising everything on the I/O path because assumptions about the relative speed of I/O and computing that have been true for the last 30 years are suddenly wrong (especially on mobile devices).
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Stop redoing the ui
Stop redoing the ui
Stop redoing the ui
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: (Score:3)
C'mon, text renders 184% faster, you can't ignore that. That's rendering a line of text in .027 milliseconds instead of 0.0496 milliseconds, definitely an improvement, and long overdue. Who cares that in order to do that you'll need to have 1400 graphic cores running at full speed, using about 0.8kW in the process.
...typographically-rich Metro-style apps. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:...typographically-rich Metro-style apps. (Score:5, Funny)
So, "typographically rich" is the new buzzword, yes?
Give us $1 million or WE WILL USE BLOCK CAPS EVERYWHERE.
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: (Score:3)
"Typographically rich" means for me to use what is available since 30 years or more: hyphenations for text, real small caps and ligatures. In the design guidelines is only some crappy font settings which I know and do not love from every Web page out there. So nothing new here at all.
But what should I expect if you just take Html, JS and Css to design applications. If you not take the hint: it's the worst possible format for good designs. I mean, it took what, 10 years for CSS to finally get gradient suppor
Re: (Score:3)
well-established typographic rules
Well, remind me then which company gave us Comic Sans.
Yes but.. (Score:2)
Re:Yes but.. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Last time I've tried Start8, it didn't actually recreate the Win7 Start menu. Instead, it shows the Win8 new Metro home screen in a popup window in the same location where the Start menu would've been in Win7.
Re:Yes but.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Yes but.. (Score:4)
yeah wonderful, but the stupid metro start menu ruins it all..
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]
Seriously, can we give Microsoft some cred... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Try Windows 8 and you would take back any credit you give them for Windows 7.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Seriously, can we give Microsoft some cred... (Score:5, Insightful)
We only use money because, although it sucks unbelievably badly at helping us distribute scarce resources, it does so better than anything else we've been able to come up with.
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: (Score:3)
I am sure a 286 will run the latest Linux GUI without a flaw.
Oh, and look at what Mac needs to run today.
Gee, this was an intelligent and useful post !=
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (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
Re:Fighting the Wrong Battlefield (Score:4, Insightful)
you mean hardware has outpaced software, right? this is true, though instead of providing unique, useful and NEW functionality in a sane footprint, today's software is bloated up with a bunch of 'experience' aesthetics and rearrangements that, in many cases, hinder workflow for the sake of looks. proper software is functional first, intuitive next, and pretty last.
Re: (Score:3)
Software has dramatically outpaced hardware over the last decade.
Yet, we're still waiting for the ultimate programming language for multicore systems.
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.
Now you can fry eggs on gpu not only while gaming (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3)
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.
Let's be realistic (Score:5, Funny)
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).
Speed for all apps (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Dude, get out. This is 2012. All the intelligent commenters have fucked off already. If you ever find one, please be a sport and send up a flare so I can find them too.
I bet most of the people still here weren't even born when MS-bashing was still cool.
Re:Speed for all apps (Score:4, Insightful)
fuck animations.. they're just a song and dance the user has to wait for EVERY time he clicks something. that metro menu is an abomination. all that work just to start an application?
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.
And Linux in the mean time... (Score:3)
And in the mean time, Linux still offers no way to draw smooth animations by synchronizing them to vblank. Xsync was supposed to solve that problem 30 years ago, and yet, it still hasn't.
Re:really? (Score:4, Funny)
no it isn't :-P
maybe your machine isn't hardware accelerated enough.
Re: (Score:3)
Here's to hoping they've got their driver-related ducks in a row... methinks they don't... at least not for everything. So while one person is getting sunburned eyes from the speed of the Metro interface, there are a few others who watch their computers implode in a steaming pile of pastel shit.
In other words... I have reservations about how well this will work, and since this is Microsoft... You'll get full hardware acceleration in Windows 9.
Re:crash faster (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (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 refor
Re: (Score:3)
Wait...you're running an unreleased version of software and complaining it crashed...
Well that's what a BETA/RC is supposed to do. Crash. If it didn't, than it would be a release version. ;-)
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:crash faster (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:crash faster (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
--Ever heard of 4DOS? They updated the product for Windows as a CMD replacement:
http://jpsoft.com/index.php [jpsoft.com]
I use the free version, but I'm really happy with it. I'm more of a Linux guy these days, or I would prolly pay for the full version.
Re:crash faster (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
I suspect that there are tools for Windows, but I don't know what they are, and I don't care to pay for them.
I've got 16 desktops (only 8 in use right now) with 1-4 terminals open on each, plus other software for those tasks that need graphics or sound. 301 active processes (ps uax|wc -l), machine using 2% CPU.
Unfortunately I can't keep everything open on the various desktops like want it for six months at a time anymore, due to the frequent kernel updates.
Windows has a lot of annoyances for someone who ha
Re: (Score:3)
Here's the classic Bash answer:
tr -cs A-Za-z '\n' | tr A-Z a-z | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | sed ${1}q
Re: (Score:3)
Your video card's driver sucks. Install a working version, or switch to a company that provides working drivers (haha, as if that existed...)
Re:crash faster (Score:4, Funny)
SEE? Windows is buggy!
A REAL OS would have just kept on chugging until those puppies burned out.
Re:crash faster (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:crash faster (Score:5, Funny)
was that during install time when you inserted the Windows install disk instead of SuSE or Redhat? --
Re:crash faster (Score:5, Funny)
You can use Windows as a server? Gosh, next you'll be saying they do phones too.
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:crash faster (Score:5, Insightful)
just like every single operating system in service today.
There, FTFY.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:crash faster (Score:4, Funny)
No kidding! If the drivers have drivers, then thats an extra layer of protection.
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.
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, Insightful)
Re:crash faster (Score:4, Insightful)
In a corporate environment? HELLO?! If your shop is so small, that you actually can look at the desktop environment without your networking, then it's not really a corporate environment.
Yeah, your point may be factual and correct but in the real world, it's mighty useless...
Re: (Score:3)
Ha.. that's a bit of a stretch. I turn roaming profiles off on a number of desktops and if the system hasn't been down for too long, windows will allow cached credentials to get you to a desktop as long as the last valid password is used. Well, at least XP will, we have application issues stopping a move to newer operating system at one of my sites. I have never tried to log on with vista or windows 7 with the AD down at my other sites. But you can get to a desktop without touching the network at a corporat
Re: (Score:3)
Which goes back to it only being the best business desktop because most businesses use MS office (thus run windows, thus have the install base to maximise profit on a dev platform).
In an ab-initio race with today's platforms, I think we'd see something like the home computer market in the 80s. Very diverse. Any evolutionaly system can achieve a false maxima, which is the niche that Windows occupies at the moment. It may not be the most effective tool to bring to bear in many situations these days, but it
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:crash faster (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Crap. Window is the best because Microsoft offer a complete suite of products catered to integrating all the common back office functions. Directory, file, print, email, proxy, database, web and Office (and a whole bunch of other stuff too long to list here) all integrates seamlessly out of the box. I've seen plenty of MS haters attempt to replicate this functionality with a bunch of bespoke home brew 'free' solutions that are undocumented, unreliable and impossible for another employee to figure out what is going on.
Re: (Score:3)
Anyone who is still waiting for the "year of the Linux Desktop" will be waiting for a long time.
I don't know about that, but Ubuntu has clearly not sang its last song. With smooth and nice Wayland coming, Steam for games and, the slick Unity interface (yes, I like it, especially when it runs faster now), there's interesting times ahead for desktop Linux too.
Re:crash faster (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
I bet it also crashes much much faster!!
Jokes aside, I've been testing the latest release, and not only is it stable, for the first time in my experience, a new Microsoft OS is faster on older hardware than the previous versions. Yes, I know Apple did that for years, but it's still a welcome trend for users (if not for hardware makers, as it provides less incentive to go out and buy new stuff". I've been pleasantly surprised how fast it is thus far. I hate the new interface paradigm, but performance-wise, I just can't complain.
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.
Re:crash faster (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who cares... (Score:4, Funny)
That is the generally-accepted definition of the word "faster".
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Do you mean GDI or GDI+ (they are two different things)?
GDI+ has been a legacy API for years, barely maintained solely because .NET WinForms sits on top of it. I don't think it was ever properly hardware accelerated - the framework for that was created in XP, but no-one bothered on the driver side.
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: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: (Score:3)
Great story, except that Windows 7 required less memory than Windows Vista... and Windows 8 requires significantly less memory and CPU than Windows 7.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
If they want to improve performance of the OS they should look at improving disk accesses - the boot from a classic hard disk can take ages. CPU performance is not much of an issue these days - and only computers I have experienced slow graphics on are computers ripe for retirement anyway.