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: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:2006-02-15
Well its kind of impractical to accelerate everything, even OSX doesn't do that.
Still, OSX and Windows both accelerate more drawing functions than X (or any X-based GUI toolkit) currently does. IMHO they should modernize the available graphic drawing function set and accelerate them where possible. And yes, GTK+ should allow the user to take advantage of Glitz. Even if it was not on by default it should be possible to enable and disable it at runtime.
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.