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:2005-07-24
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:2005-07-06
Current systems, as I understand them capture what's being displayed and apply varying degrees of compression to it before sending the output across the network. Theoretically, with a 3D accelerated desktop you could just send the instructions for drawing the primitives the desktop is composed of across the network and have the GPU at the other side render them freeing up processing power on the server side and allowing for higher quality and a richer experience on the client side.
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:2007-02-17
Well its kind of impractical to accelerate everything, even OSX doesn't do that. There are still some things that get don eon the cpu. It would be nice to see the gtk devs support hardware accelerated widgets though. It could allow for a much smoother experience and people would stop complaining about how their desktop looks liek its from the 90's (which is an exaggeration). Compiz is great but it only handle one aspect of the effects it, the toolkit should be more robust and support more features.
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