Bill Gates unveils Vista editions, impersonates teapot. - by R Soul
descenterace on 23/5/2006 at 06:24
GPUs deal with polygons. Polygons == flat. Volume is an illusion. Windows == polygons. Window contents == a texture.
Suddenly 80% of the GDI code is obsolete. Why keep it around? The point is that using the CPU is slow and wasteful. If the graphics card is idle then it makes sense to use it since it can do the job faster anyway. And the GPU is designed to do this.
No, the improvement in terms of efficiency won't be noticed, but the average user will notice when the UI uses all the other features that arise naturally from using the proper hardware, namely proper transparency, antialiasing, window scaling, etc. And what's more, these extras do not cause a performance hit. Hell, if MS were trying to make Vista run on low-end hardware they could do all the flashy stuff on a GF4Ti.
Azal on 23/5/2006 at 12:36
Quote Posted by Aja
I wish that when a file or program is in use, Windows would TELL you what's using it if you try to delete it.
I know this is an old post, but just saw it. For what it's worth now, I use Who Lock Me and it's bloody marvellous.
It adds a line to the right click interface so that, when you r-click on a file, it instantly tells you what programs are accessing it at that moment.
ZylonBane on 23/5/2006 at 14:35
Quote Posted by descenterace
...proper transparency...
Of what? I've tried the transparent-window thing with the NVidia control panel, and it sucks. All it gives you is a window that's hard to read, with something else hard to read behind it. There's a reason books aren't printed on onionskin.
Jenesis on 23/5/2006 at 15:33
ZB has a point. It's hard to read a book when your eyes keep filling with tears. Could work well for tragic romance novels, though.
As for Windows, having everything go slightly transparent whenever you drag a window can make rearranging a cluttered workspace rather easier, since you can see where everything is.
Aja on 23/5/2006 at 15:42
Quote Posted by Azal
I know this is an old post, but just saw it. For what it's worth now, I use Who Lock Me and it's bloody marvellous.
It adds a line to the right click interface so that, when you r-click on a file, it instantly tells you what programs are accessing it at that moment.
Thanks, that's just what I was looking for.
ZylonBane on 23/5/2006 at 15:48
I don't suppose that tool tells you WHO has a file open? Bloody annoying tramping around the cubes trying to find out who's using a file I need to update.
descenterace on 24/5/2006 at 09:33
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Of what? I've tried the transparent-window thing with the NVidia control panel, and it sucks. All it gives you is a window that's hard to read, with something else hard to read behind it. There's a reason books aren't printed on onionskin.
Ah. Here I was talking from a programmer's PoV. Windows that aren't rectangular use a transparency overlay which, frankly, is a pain in the ass to do in .NET.
There are other perfectly useful examples of transparency in Windows, eg. selection rectangles. Personally I'm fine with a dotted rectangle but apps these days tend to use shaded rectangles; duplicating that in a .NET app without rendering to the window directly is difficult. You can't use a transparent control because the transparency API, as previously mentioned, sucks. It didn't even work properly until WinXP.
Doing this in hardware means that these features will be available, will work correctly, and won't cause a massive performance hit. Ink-capable web apps are particularly bad offenders. As it stands, using a control to draw a selection rectangle means the Ink needs redrawing every time the selection changes, which is very slow with software rendering of 40+ strokes. 40 Ink strokes is not a lot.
To anyone with a graphics tablet: Ink apps are very highly optimised as a rule. The programmers have to pull out all the stops to get Ink to render efficiently. As I recently found out, that typically means that application library APIs are locked down pretty tight; if a library is missing a feature you need to use, you end up rewriting it all from scratch and lose some performance. Hardware rendering of Ink will solve all of .NET's speed problems in this field, since the nastier in-app optimisations will be done by the OS transparently.
