Yesterday, during the opening hours of the D6 conference, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher jointly interviewed Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates. While the interview dealt mostly with the past, Yahoo, and a bit of Vista, by far the most interesting part was the first ever public appearance of Vista's successor: Windows 7. Earlier today, the team behind D6 posted a video of the demonstration, which was conducted by Microsoft's Julie Larson-Green. From a graphical user interface point of view, there were some interesting things in there.
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Member since:2005-07-06
The advantage of 3d accelerated desktops is offloading the processing load to your graphics card from your main processor. That and it can make remote desktop type apps vastly more efficient.
I will agree most of the user visible effects are cute toys and nothing more though
Edited 2008-05-28 20:56 UTC
Member since:2005-07-24
How so? Remote desktop type apps are bandwidth and/or network latency limited. Even on a LAN. You'd be hard pressed to tell, even on NX, VESA from 2D acceleration from 3D acceleration on a LAN or a WAN.
Edited 2008-05-28 21:23 UTC
Member since:2006-02-15
The advantage of 3d accelerated desktops is offloading the processing load to your graphics card from your main processor.
The issue here is that atleast the way things are done now, only window drawing is done in hardware. All the GUI elements like buttons, window frames, text, all picture related actions, color gradients and all that are done in software. GTK+ uses Cairo, and Cairo supports hardware acceleration through Glitz, but GTK+ devs have seen it better not to take use of that. So, in short, to FULLY take advantage of modern GPUs in GUI everything should accelerated.
Member since:
2005-07-24
I agree. Then again, I'm still waiting for 3D on the desktop to reveal advantages which are not of the "reaching" nature.
I suspect that we will be well into the "Touchiz Fusion" era before anything solid shows up. But solutions in search of a problem are like that. They eventually find one, if there is really any benefit to them. ;-)