Hardware Accelerating Everything: Windows 8 Graphics

I like their concept of glitch count. I think it's something [H] should consider adopting with reference to micro-stuttering.
 
While its good to offload normal 2d stuff to the GPU, it would be nice to see some more details behind how they did their comparisons, otherwise it just appears to be more marketing than substance.
 
You can probably find more info looking up whitepapers on WDDM 1.2, although they may not be available until after 8 has RTM'd. There were awesome papers on technet that went into detail on the differences between 1.0 (vista) and 1.1 (7) and how they were able to cut memory usage and improved performance in DWM and etc.
 
how much of this is relevant? sorry but after a certain point rendering text faster is pretty worthless. as is most of what they are boasting about. unless they are still looking at very low end hardware (think netbooks, tablets) I don't see this being all that important for desktops. its not that I don't like the improvements but I have to wonder how relevant they are as microsoft doesn't seem to have much chance in the tablet market.
 
Valset said:
how much of this is relevant? sorry but after a certain point rendering text faster is pretty worthless. as is most of what they are boasting about. unless they are still looking at very low end hardware (think netbooks, tablets) I don't see this being all that important for desktops. its not that I don't like the improvements but I have to wonder how relevant they are as microsoft doesn't seem to have much chance in the tablet market.
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Yes, its very relevant to lower powered tablets, no doubt.
 
Valset said:
how much of this is relevant? sorry but after a certain point rendering text faster is pretty worthless. as is most of what they are boasting about. unless they are still looking at very low end hardware (think netbooks, tablets) I don't see this being all that important for desktops. its not that I don't like the improvements but I have to wonder how relevant they are as microsoft doesn't seem to have much chance in the tablet market.
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Good point there, does it make a noticable difference on the most common laptops and desktops or is it only worth it on tablets and phones?
Until we know it's just another marketing video.
 
Valset said:
how much of this is relevant? sorry but after a certain point rendering text faster is pretty worthless. as is most of what they are boasting about. unless they are still looking at very low end hardware (think netbooks, tablets) I don't see this being all that important for desktops. its not that I don't like the improvements but I have to wonder how relevant they are as microsoft doesn't seem to have much chance in the tablet market.
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It matters a lot. Look at Expose in OSX, expanding/dexpanding title bars or flyouts or even simply scrolling a webpage in Safari. Its stunning how much smoother it is than on Windows. Hopefully Windoes 8 fixes all that.
 
Am I a curmudgeon if I become angry every time I hear the word "app"?
I see that normal programs on a computer are now apps.
 
Valset said:
how much of this is relevant? sorry but after a certain point rendering text faster is pretty worthless. as is most of what they are boasting about. unless they are still looking at very low end hardware (think netbooks, tablets) I don't see this being all that important for desktops. its not that I don't like the improvements but I have to wonder how relevant they are as microsoft doesn't seem to have much chance in the tablet market.
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It's relevant because faster hardware accelerated text can make a big difference in how responsive a tablet feels. As the blog post explains, its noticeable when scrolling through a long document on a touch screen and helps in reducing CPU utilization.
 
Wolfkin said:
Good point there, does it make a noticable difference on the most common laptops and desktops or is it only worth it on tablets and phones?
Until we know it's just another marketing video.
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Yes it should make a difference on desktops, that is via the other optimizations such as reduced system memory usage, initializing DX and frame redraw.
 
Cali3350 said:
It matters a lot. Look at Expose in OSX, expanding/dexpanding title bars or flyouts or even simply scrolling a webpage in Safari. Its stunning how much smoother it is than on Windows. Hopefully Windoes 8 fixes all that.
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What the? First does Safari for OSX even have smooth scrolling? Stock Web kit on linux does not, and Safari does not....so I don't know what you're on about there. Second there are Expose like utilities for Windows that do just as good a job graphically.
 
I hope Microsoft is making DirectX optimizations across the board and not just focusing on apps. We're sitting on so much untapped performance!
 
Skripka said:
What the? First does Safari for OSX even have smooth scrolling? Stock Web kit on linux does not, and Safari does not....so I don't know what you're on about there. Second there are Expose like utilities for Windows that do just as good a job graphically.
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Highly disagree. Internet Explorer does *decent* smooth scrolling, but its nowhere up to Safari level. And every single Expose like app ive ever tried on Windows runs at ~10fps when in use, a far cry from OSX perfect smoothness. Even simply looking in the "My Documents" folder in windows and expanding or collapsing the more info tab stutters slightly. Its not bad, but its not liquid smooth.
 
While being immensely important on low power handheld devices, it's nice that we'll be able to offload that rendering to a discrete GPU and take the load off CPU. At least on my work computers, when I have several applications running, page scrolling can be really jerky and slow. In that sense it'll make for better multitasking on intermediate powered devices.
 
Skripka said:
What the? First does Safari for OSX even have smooth scrolling? Stock Web kit on linux does not, and Safari does not....so I don't know what you're on about there. Second there are Expose like utilities for Windows that do just as good a job graphically.
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He's talking about Quartz Compositor vs WDDM. And yes Safari does nave hardware acceleration, at least on OSX.
 
Ryokurin said:
It's relevant because faster hardware accelerated text can make a big difference in how responsive a tablet feels. As the blog post explains, its noticeable when scrolling through a long document on a touch screen and helps in reducing CPU utilization.
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It makes sense, since Windows 8 is being designed solely for tablets. It won't make a difference in the real world.
 
sleepeeg3 said:
It makes sense, since Windows 8 is being designed solely for tablets. It won't make a difference in the real world.
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Did you notice a difference between graphics performance between Vista and 7? Then you'll see a difference between 7 and 8. You can tell the people who just watched the video but didn't read the post.
 
Valset said:
how much of this is relevant? sorry but after a certain point rendering text faster is pretty worthless. as is most of what they are boasting about. unless they are still looking at very low end hardware (think netbooks, tablets) I don't see this being all that important for desktops. its not that I don't like the improvements but I have to wonder how relevant they are as microsoft doesn't seem to have much chance in the tablet market.
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Windows 8 is a tablet OS, so yes that low end hardware is what they are aiming for.
 
Valset said:
how much of this is relevant? sorry but after a certain point rendering text faster is pretty worthless. as is most of what they are boasting about. unless they are still looking at very low end hardware (think netbooks, tablets) I don't see this being all that important for desktops. its not that I don't like the improvements but I have to wonder how relevant they are as microsoft doesn't seem to have much chance in the tablet market.
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It makes a big difference even on laptops and desktops. Even desktop rendering in Windows 8 is noticeably smoother than 7. IE 10 rendering is fantastic and it's like butter on my tablets.

The more I use Windows 8 the more I appreciate the overall performance gains over 7. I'm doing as much work as I can on my x220t convertible tablet because it's just more responsive than my sig rig. I have a feeling that as much as some bash Windows 8 and say they won't polute their desktops with it, many of those people will end up using Windows 8 simply for the performance boost even if they hack out Metro and the Start Screen.
 
Cali3350 said:
And every single Expose like app ive ever tried on Windows runs at ~10fps when in use, a far cry from OSX perfect smoothness.
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There is an Expose like utility included with the Microsoft Touch Mouse and it certainly performs much better than this even on Windows 7 using Intel HD graphics.
 
It's this type of stuff that will get me over my "hell no" stance of switching to Windows 8 and at least give it a try for $40.
 
All these years, we've had dedicated graphics cards and only now are we getting hardware acceleration in things other than gaming. I guess better late than never.
 
Too bad no one actually looked at how fucking ugly and useless metro is for a desktop PC user.
 
Cali3350 said:
It matters a lot. Look at Expose in OSX, expanding/dexpanding title bars or flyouts or even simply scrolling a webpage in Safari. Its stunning how much smoother it is than on Windows.
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They're pretty much on par with each other in my experience. OS X does currently struggle with animations on higher resolutions (like on the MacBook Retina), but 10.8 is supposed to address this.
 
Interesting. It's this kind of stuff that hopefully will make phone, tablet, and laptop batteries hold a charge longer during use.
 
dnottis said:
Too bad no one actually looked at how fucking ugly and useless metro is for a desktop PC user.
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I'm sure they did look, and then decided that they didn't care. We're going to get a tablet OS whether we want it or not!

I guess MS feels like they can do what they want because it's not like they have any serious competition in the PC OS world.

Also, I'm pretty sure that the reason that Direct X hasn't been updated in a while is because MS feels there's no need since their next console isn't due to be out for a while yet.
 
dnottis said:
Too bad no one actually looked at how fucking ugly and useless metro is for a desktop PC user.
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its really a 50/50 fight atm, not everyone dislikes it (or dont care), not every likes it (or don't care). just like how the start menu was introduced in windows 95
 
I can understand why people might dislike the Metro aesthetic, but can you really argue that Aero actually looks good?
 
Madoc said:
I'm sure they did look, and then decided that they didn't care. We're going to get a tablet OS whether we want it or not!

I guess MS feels like they can do what they want because it's not like they have any serious competition in the PC OS world.
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Obviously most of the work in Windows 8 focused on mobility because that where the world is going with computing particularly on the consumer side. And more tablets are being considered and apps written even for business and productivity purposes.

I don't think Microsoft cares how some characterize Windows 8 as a tablet in part because of Windows' dominance on the desktop but mostly because that's just not the truth. Windows 8 works just fine on the desktop and even faster than Windows 7 on the desktop and is virtually 100% application complete with Windows 7 on the desktop.
 
Monkey God said:
While its good to offload normal 2d stuff to the GPU, it would be nice to see some more details behind how they did their comparisons, otherwise it just appears to be more marketing than substance.
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This is a developer and software engineer blog though, not a marketing piece by their PR department. I think you can take their word for it.

But yeah I'd like to see how they came up with their figures as well.
 
Ryokurin said:
Windows has been 3D accelerated since Vista
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It's much more than Direct3D. There's DirectWrite for fonts, Direct2D for 2D rendering, there's DirectInput for mouse, keyboard and other peripherals, and so on.

Most of these DirectX functions were reserved for DirectX games. Microsoft broke it out into Windows as a whole.
 
wonderfield said:
I can understand why people might dislike the Metro aesthetic, but can you really argue that Aero actually looks good?
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I can argue that Metro looks good. Topics of this nature are so subjective that it hardly matters in some ways. Some people will hate Metro, others will like and the vast middle won't really care one way or the other.
 
This all sounds awesome now just give me the ability to use a layout that looks and feels like windows 7 if I want to and I'm in for ten copies.

Seriously why couldn't they just have put in a classic mode, I am fine with the metro tile layout thing for tablets and smart phones but for my desktop I just want.... a desktop with icons and a start button.
 
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