Vista making a mess?

[PeterT]

For whatever reason (possibly user stupidity) I've lost AERO Glass transparency on my Radeon 9800. It's still sluggish to drag stuff around and so on with or without the funky effects.

Very strange, the thing is that on my 9700, it's completely smooth with the driver included in the CTP. However, if I upgrade to ATI's alpha it starts to feel very sluggish, and CPU usage is also through the roof. I rolled back

From what I've read, it's a ps_2_0 shader for the glass effect. Most probably it's just a dependent read based on some sort of gather/kernel operation. Without any more details, I'd put money on it not being that disimiliar to everyones favourite HDRI post processing effect: bloom.

Sure, so much is quite clear. The reason why I'd like to know exactly how they did it is that they probably invested a lot of time into doing it in the fastest way possible. I wrote my Bachelor's project about image processing on GPUs, so I can think of lots of ways to achieve the effect, but it would be nice to know which is fastest

 

[N00b]

It's WDDM (incorrectly referred to as LDDM previously in this thread ) that is providing the big changes here. Direct3D9Ex is the updated version of the D3D9 API to take advantage of WDDM on Vista, D3D10 is built on WDDM from the ground-up.

Did they rename LDDM or is WDDM a subset LDDM? The microsoft site still mentions LDDM a lot (example).

 

[N00b]

Dont disagree at all, MS is hard at work at making DX9.X as efficient as possible as well. My point being that DX10 hardware owners wont be the only ones to benefit from this. Microsoft has to create insentive for people to upgrade their operating system. There are how many DX8/9 cards in average/enthusiast joe consumer computers? There are how many DX10? Point being they arent only optimizing the operating system for yet to be released hardware.

Thats what the OP seemed to be asking about, if DX10 and the performance that followed would make previous hardware under DX9 very obsolete in terms of performance.

Sorry. Misunderstood you.

 

[KimB]

Did they rename LDDM or is WDDM a subset LDDM? The microsoft site still mentions LDDM a lot (example).

Well, you shouldn't expect the driver model to have a reference to "Longhorn" remain in the name

Personally, I'm surprised they didn't select "VDDM."

 

[horvendile]

That's a lot of answers. Thanks!
Bad time or not, I am quite anxious to get a new computer relatively soon. The primary reason is not that my current rig is ancient - which, by all means, it is - but that I just moved to a small apartment where the noise it generates is really annoying.

Mayhap it is a good idea to skip the high end video cards. Thing is, I have noticed that in the life span of my computers I change video card once or twice, but I never ever change CPU before buying a new rig. Rational or not, that is how I appear to function. Thus, limited upgradeability of S939 is a non-issue and I should just buy as fast a CPU as I can afford (likely the X2 4200 or 4400), but buying a semi-slow video card isn't much of a disaster if it wasn't expensive and I can exchange it later.

Hence, after reading this thread I seriously consider skipping the X1900s and go for an X1600XT (or, if I'm feeling wild, an X800XL). I'll just have to live with dubious AoE3 performance. The stumbling block may be Oblivion - I would hate buying a new, expensive rig only to discover that my modest video card won't let me play Oblivion satisfactorily.

 

[JHoxley]

Well, you shouldn't expect the driver model to have a reference to "Longhorn" remain in the name

It had a brief stage as XDDM as well I think.

WDDM for Windows Display Driver Model is what I got told by one of the developers a few days ago.

Personally, I'm surprised they didn't select "VDDM."

Yeah, I was expecting VDDM initially. However, I think it might be a sign that it's going to exist for much longer than Vista does. DXGI is the other major component - and that appears to be bedding in for a long stay (10 years+) and will be the basis for "D3D10+1" and "D3D10+2"...

Jack

 

[Diplo]

Some other cool facts you may not have known about the Vista GUI:
- you can play a video or game in windowed mode, then put some other window on top of it and everything will just work correctly (ie, the video/game content will be blurred in real time by the glass shader)
- you can run a game or video and then activate the window switcher (the thingie that shows the windows in a 3D stacked view - win+tab) and it will continue to run in the tilted/scaled window
- active window frame buttons have a nice halo/glow effect

And what practical use is any of this? It may look nice but it's really just fluff and won't actually provide any really useful functionality. People criticised XP for looking "fisher price" but at least XP did improve the UI in many areas. Adding transparency adds little value I can see.

 

[Jawed]

On the other hand, I'm hoping that using shaders will mean that arbitrary scaling of (amongst other things) web pages will work properly, scaling both text and pictures and doing so with nice filtering.

Prolly a vain hope

Jawed

 

[N00b]

And what practical use is any of this? It may look nice but it's really just fluff and won't actually provide any really useful functionality. People criticised XP for looking "fisher price" but at least XP did improve the UI in many areas. Adding transparency adds little value I can see.

The practical use is soooo o-b-v-i-o-u-s. Those good-for-nothing Mac-using mouse pushers have to stop teasing us how much prettier their OSX desktop is compared to XP.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Great, I can't wait for the first virus to come out that makes your entire desktop glow. Or what kind of bugs this thing has. Yay, Microsoft. I hope it requires more main RAM than you can shake a stick at to run, and that it always leaves certain bits of crap in your VRAM so that your games don't perform as well.

 

[the maddman]

And what practical use is any of this? It may look nice but it's really just fluff and won't actually provide any really useful functionality. People criticised XP for looking "fisher price" but at least XP did improve the UI in many areas. Adding transparency adds little value I can see.

Actually there is a good reason for this. Finally MS is going to force the 3D vendors to support more than one 3D data stream at a time. What we are seeing in the CTP is just "fluff" but it's fluff that requires better resource sharing and abstraction. As someone that runs WoW in a window, this hopefully means no more extreme slowdowns anytime a tooltip pops up.

Just think of this as the video cards learning to multitask. Everyone said at the time that was pointless too.

 

[Geo]

Win9x was not an operation system it was a mess. Quite literally. Most of the features that make NT and it's successors stable and secure do not exists in Win9x. But stability and security do have a price. Apart from that writing driver for Win2K and XP is much more complicated than writing drivers for Win9x. Of course there was a certain learning curve. Honestly, would you rather have Win9x back?

No, no, no. But that wasn't the point. People claiming the inevitability of Vista being faster gaming --or even exactly equal speed-- for dx9 class cards on Vista vs dx9 class cards on XP are whistling in the dark at this point. Maybe they'll be right. I honest to ghu hope they are. Personally, I'd be very unwilling to make a three-year-investment kind of bet on it just yet.

 

[Razor1]

No, no, no. But that wasn't the point. People claiming the inevitability of Vista being faster gaming --or even exactly equal speed-- for dx9 class cards on Vista vs dx9 class cards on XP are whistling in the dark at this point. Maybe they'll be right. I honest to ghu hope they are. Personally, I'd be very unwilling to make a three-year-investment kind of bet on it just yet.

Yeah thats true, I'm willing to bet it will be just like XP, MS said it will run programs faster too. and it does but you have to have a more powerful system to being with

 

[DemoCoder]

On the other hand, I'm hoping that using shaders will mean that arbitrary scaling of (amongst other things) web pages will work properly, scaling both text and pictures and doing so with nice filtering.

Prolly a vain hope

Jawed

It already works, you just have to buy a Mac.

 

[Demirug]

The user<->kernel switching is pretty much the reason behind most graphics programmers going on and on (and on and on...) about batching. Batching lots of primitives into a single DIP() means you get a lot of data to the GPU for a single kernel mode switch.

Jack

Yes, but the new model will kill the encode/decode overhead for all the statechanges between the draw calls, too. I am not sure how much the fixed function to shader translation will give us. At least it will make drivers less komplex.

 

[PeterT]

And what practical use is any of this? It may look nice but it's really just fluff and won't actually provide any really useful functionality. People criticised XP for looking "fisher price" but at least XP did improve the UI in many areas. Adding transparency adds little value I can see.

Erm, it's pretty? Is that soo bad? Some people are making up reasons like shadows making it easier to see which window is active, or glass enabling you to see if something changed in the window below, but I'm happy to admit that I just love Desktop eyecandy. And really, if the graphics performance is better than XP, then what's the problem even for those unwilling to sacrifice speed for optics?

Oh, and stuff like the Window switcher actually enhances usability IMHO.

Actually there is a good reason for this. Finally MS is going to force the 3D vendors to support more than one 3D data stream at a time. What we are seeing in the CTP is just "fluff" but it's fluff that requires better resource sharing and abstraction. As someone that runs WoW in a window, this hopefully means no more extreme slowdowns anytime a tooltip pops up.

That already works, there is no noticable slowdown at all when covering game windows in the current CTP. However, in windowed mode you'll lose quite some FPS compared to XP. But that is probably the result of the Beta state of the OS and my card with its puny 128 MB of RAM

 

[Blazkowicz]

On the other hand, I'm hoping that using shaders will mean that arbitrary scaling of (amongst other things) web pages will work properly, scaling both text and pictures and doing so with nice filtering.

Prolly a vain hope

Jawed

I'm gonna try this
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=28227

more seriously, I'd like a simple opengl PDF viewer where you arbitrarily zoom with the scrollwheel and it's always smooth, no need for shaders, simple bilinear filtering would be good enough..

 

[Diplo]

Erm, it's pretty? Is that soo bad?

Not in itself, no. Eye candy can be fun, I guess. However, what worries me is the fact that really useful stuff like WinFS has been dropped. Pretty is the icing on the cake, but ultimately functionality, efficiency, stability, security and compatability are all far more important. Vista needs to deliver on these, not just look cute.

 

[KimB]

Side comment:
If you like transparent windows, you can get 'em on nVidia hardware through nView in XP/2k (dunno about Win9x).

 

[PeterT]

Pretty is the icing on the cake, but ultimately functionality, efficiency, stability, security and compatability are all far more important. Vista needs to deliver on these, not just look cute.

In terms of security, Beta 2 already has enough security features to annoy me a lot until I find the settings to disable them all... So they are at least trying - moving to the CLR as the standard app platform should also help tremendously with stuff like buffer overflows.

Fun to be defending MS, it's not like I actually care that much, I just was pretty impressed with the vista beta.

@Chal: Works on Ati as well, probably even with XGI
But that's of course completely incomparable to what can be achieved in Vista.