Under the hood of Vista graphics

Published on March 6, 2006 By Thomas Thomassen In Personal Computing

I came across this article about how Vista handles the graphics differently from previous versions of Windows. What I found most interesting is the offscreen composition of windows and how it will, *knock wood* get rid of these strage artifacts when an application turn unresponsive. And it also indicated that there's some very nifty stuff that can be done with this. *nudge Stardock*

Comments

Adamness

on Mar 07, 2006

The more I read about Vista, the more impressed I am.

RPGFX

on Mar 07, 2006

Agreed, Adamness. Good read, TT. Thanks.

on Mar 07, 2006

Yeah. Amazing indeed.

Action_Jay

on Mar 07, 2006

Looks great, but in practice, it's slower than ever

I installed 5308 yesterday, and it borders on unusable. Gotta tweak some things yet, of course, but it's not a great start.

I sure hope they tighten it up by RTM time. I read this one article that was all 'no more artifacts on the desktop and blank windows thanks to the new engine!', though now it's just black squares and total lockups while waiting for the dang things to draw themselves. And I consider my PC to be fairly high end.

Anyway, Windowblinds and WindowFX can already to 99% of the Vista effects, and without bogging things down. So I'm happy using those instead. All I need now is Aurora and we're good as gold.

BattleFella

on Mar 07, 2006

When the Vista information was posted on the DirectX Dev mailing lists last year, I was pretty skeptical, and still am. The entire 'virtualization' concept adds an additional layer of API - a "middleman" - in to the mix. DirectX may result in a few black screens when apps screw up, but that's because apps get FULL control. Take away full control and you lose speed, flexibility, and possibly even more.

Some (very smart) graphics devs still support Vista graphics, so I'm waiting to see, but I'm certainly skeptical.

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