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chrisv
Guest
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 Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 2:37 pm Post subject: Re: NVIDIA: "We Underestimated Necessary Resources for Vista |
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joey wrote:
| Quote: | On Fri, 20 Apr 2007 15:48:40 -0500, chrisv <chrisv@nospam.invalid
wrote:
joey wrote:
People said the same thing about XP at first.
No, actually, most people did not. Vista really DOES suck, just like
ME really DID suck.
Yes they did, go back and look at google group archives what gamers
were saying when WinXP was released "waaaaI want my 98 back!!" is all
over the place.
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Why are you comparing 98->XP, when you should be comparing 2k->XP?
Compared to DOS-based 98, XP certainly required more hardware, but
that's not the same as "sucking". XP was unquestionable superior to
98.
Vista is worse than XP. Vista sucks. |
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John Cocktosen
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 8:59 pm Post subject: Re: NVIDIA: "We Underestimated Necessary Resources for Vista |
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chrisv wrote:
| Quote: |
Yes they did, go back and look at google group archives what gamers
were saying when WinXP was released "waaaaI want my 98 back!!" is all
over the place.
Why are you comparing 98->XP, when you should be comparing 2k->XP?
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Sorry to jump in here, but the 98->XP comparison is correct (in his
comment about people whining when XP was released) because very few
people upgraded from 2K to XP because few people ran 2K! 2K was big in
business, but never at the home level. There are diehards who ran it
(and probably still do) and swear by it of course, but the vast majority
of the home users went from 98 to XP without ever touching 2K. |
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jukka@liimatta.org
Guest
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| Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 3:12 pm Post subject: Re: NVIDIA: "We Underestimated Necessary Resources for Vista |
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On Apr 21, 6:54 am, nospam <nos...@please.invalid> wrote:
| Quote: | 3d rendering is integrated in the operating system so you can have bollocks
3d eye candy on your desktop, you can't even play freecell in vista without
hardware 3d graphics card support.
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It's more than eye candy. Do you know how GDI works? When you move
window around the screen, that is smooth because it is bitblt copy
only. When you scroll one window over another, and parts of the window
are revealed, do you know what happens?
A paint message is sent to the window: hey, paint me suckah! This is
because there is no surface (dedicated memory) to store the image that
is generated into the window by application that created the window.
This is why the application has to keep repainting the same images
over and over again.
What if there was mechanism, which did actually *store* the images
generated for the windows somewhere? This way the graphics hardware
would only have to copy the pre-generated image into the parts of the
framebuffer that require update (such as parts of window being
revealed, window being popped to the top from taskbar, what not).
The graphics hardware already have established mechanism to do this;
they are called textures. The graphics hardware is also very fast at
drawing triangles and mapping textures into them. It makes a world of
sense to use hardware that most people already have to begin with in
their contemporary computers to accelerate operation that is fairly
common: rendering of the user interface.
The eye candy on top of this is free lunch. Since you drawing these
triangles you can just aswell choose textures that look nice.
Translucency, glowing buttons and what not are simple alpha blending
which has been on 3D hardware since day one, anyone remembers Voodoo
Graphics? It did alpha blend already, this was nearly a decade ago for
***'s sakes.
Games have done this in their own in-game UI's for years, it's a
logical thing to do same in OS UI.. this is done in Linux, OSX.. and
now on Windows as well.
I don't mind if there is eye candy when it's for free. It doesn't
change the performance of the CPU one iota if you're alpha blending or
not. It just taxes the graphics processors internal memory bandwidth a
notch more, but doesn't affect the main system (CPU, memory, etc) one
bit. If it does, it must be some *** integrated graphics chip which
uses system memory ("shared memory" aka. "unified memory" aka. "piece
of ***" :)
Now, since the application generated graphics are stored in textures,
it also allows to see "in realtime" what is going on in each
application. You see this done in the taskbar mini preview windows and
in the task switcher (winkey+tab). This is all side-effect of having
the graphics CACHED in the graphics processors local memory. If this
is done correctly (we're talking about Microsoft here so all bets are
off, ofc!), the previews would be again displayed with nearly-zero CPU
utilization, since it's just a simple command for the GPU to render a
few extra triangles into the framebuffer. Big f'ing deal.
All this isn't visible to the end user, because, to be honest, CPU's
are so f'ing fast already these days that all this redundant image
generation for the UI is so well hidden that random customer won't see
any difference if it's fast enough already.
In conclusion my personal *opinion* on all this is that this is just
the infrastructure that is good to have enabled at some point. The
transition to new programming models and API's is going to take a
while.. there is so much inertia from existing applications written
for GDI/GDI+ that are not yet as efficient as the new framework would
allow. The GDI is not "native" anymore on Vista, it is emulated only
and the commands for the underlying infrastructure are generated on-
fly (not so efficient). I heard some rumors that Visual Studio 2007
would have more exposure to the new tools for Windows Vista
application development, apparently .NET platform based.
About leaving GDI behind: good riddance! What a pain in the ***, even
compared to X.
In summary; saying that Vista is only eye-candy is extremely short-
sighted and ignorant, but *very* pragmatic, because that's all you
going to get at this time. =) |
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chrisv
Guest
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| Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 9:10 pm Post subject: Re: NVIDIA: "We Underestimated Necessary Resources for Vista |
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John Cocktosen wrote:
| Quote: | chrisv wrote:
Yes they did, go back and look at google group archives what gamers
were saying when WinXP was released "waaaaI want my 98 back!!" is all
over the place.
Why are you comparing 98->XP, when you should be comparing 2k->XP?
Sorry to jump in here, but the 98->XP comparison is correct (in his
comment about people whining when XP was released) because very few
people upgraded from 2K to XP because few people ran 2K! 2K was big in
business, but never at the home level.
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Whatever, it's irrelevant to my point.
If someone whined "waahh I want 98 back" after trying XP, it was NOT
because XP "sucked", because XP was UNQUESTIONABLY superior to 98.
It's only drawback vs. 98 is it needed stronger hardware.
Vista is worse than XP. Vista really does "suck". |
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DRS
Guest
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| Posted: Thu May 03, 2007 6:48 am Post subject: Re: NVIDIA: "We Underestimated Necessary Resources for Vista |
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"FoolsGold" <fg@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:132irbp7kaf9032@corp.supernews.com
[...]
| Quote: | There are important operating system changes that facilitate DX10. I
don't know how much the audience here knows about operating system
design, but it is fair to say it is substantial. To make it brief, I
do not think DX10 is possible on XP without a HUGE service pack that
would effectively replace the operating system kernel (making it a
completely new OS version). Such an effort is extremely costly for
MS, and its unlikely in my opinion that they will ever make such a
dramatic "patch" for XP, because a patch implies they are providing a
huge amount of development dollars (millions) to the general public
for free. Not a smart move for any company -- best to make it a
feature of the next version of the OS which includes some other
things users might be willing to pay for -- and, if they aren't
willing to pay for an upgrade to their current PC, they are sure to
get it installed for them on their next new PC purchase.
It's still a "lock-in" feature no matter which way you cut it. MS
could get DX10 to work in XP if they wanted to (***, they MADE
DirectX, they can get it to work wherever they want), but of course
their business model requires people to get forced onto another OS
just for one little feature, otherwise they won't move willingly.
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DX10 is closely tied to Vista's new driver model which is radically
different to XP's. As joey correctly noted, retrofitting DX10 would require
a massive rewrite of XP, which MS are obviously unwilling to do since
they've made it clear it has no future. Separating the driver model into
admin and user components is an important step forward, with consequences
for stability and security that go way beyond just being able to run DX10
games. In five years time anyone silly enough to be reading these archives
will be wondering what the fuss was about. |
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