DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration

UI Faux Pas

Laurence Parry — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 23:31:09 GMT

Of course, some of our customers have certain cylindrical-wrapping needs . . . but I guess that's our job, not yours. :-)

re: DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration

dzCepheus — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 02:03:52 GMT

"It would not be much harder to modify any of these transitions to be more complex - for instance to map the window content onto a spinning cylinder for minimize. Thankfully we have a crack team of graphic and UI designers that prevent us from making such UI faux pas."

What if -- and this is a big what-if, believe me -- you *wanted* your minimize effect to map the window content onto a spinning cylinder? That is - is there going to be a way for end users (or developers) to create their own effects?

re: DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration

steamy — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 04:09:33 GMT

greg, as i know at this point a directx8 card is able to render glass ( in current CTPs). does that mean a different kind of glass rendering(the PS 2.0 version) is coming?

i have a second question: why isnt it possible for the DWM to work with software rendering? i'm curious just because OS X has similar functionality since 2001, and back then there weren't any directx 9 cards out there.
i think DWM is one of the best things in Vista (THE thing for me, i'm going to upgrade just for this feature alone, i'm sick of the window drawing artifacts XP has), and a lot of people on laptops for example, without an upgrade path, will be locked out of this world of compositing. they could probably live without glass, but compositing should work with lower hardware requirements as well.

re: Performance and XGL

Nidonocu — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 05:56:18 GMT

Thanks for doing this blog. :) Its of great interest for me as I love the new DWM interface and hope to employ glass in some of my future programming.

As a suggestion for some additional topics to cover for this blog post series, could I ask if you could maybe go in to a little more detail on some of the performance issues that came up during development and how they were solved to keep Windows running smooth?
Also, while I only know a little about it myself, since DWM appeared, Linux programmers have been busy and whipping up their own 3D thing called XGL where their multiple desktops are rendered on a cube and windows get fancy effects too. While I'm not asking you to put it down, I'd be curious to know how DWM and XGL differ (other than one is DirectX based and one is OpenGL based) and what the key benefits of DWM are beyond simple appearance. (As I get moaned at all the time by Linux friends who say its nothing but sparkle!)

re: DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration

GRiNSER — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 23:08:15 GMT

i would also like an option to create custom transition effects or more fancier transition effects. you know at which competitor to look ;)

another question: will there be more animations and transitions inside the vista gui, not only in the desktop manager? or are those windows like explorer in vista again limited to the slow GDI+ that doesn't allow sleek transitions [like transitions when switching between folders or folder views in explorer or panels animating in and out]?

re: DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration

Princess — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 09:46:43 GMT

If an app is using the hardware for rendering, how to you ensure the DWM doesn't conflict with the app for use of the hardware?
- From a scheduling point of view, couldn't a bad app hog the GPU, preventing the DWM from running?
- From a memory point of view, what happens if an app has locked its target surface and the DWM wants the contents of it?

Responding to Comments from "DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration"

Greg Schechter's Blog — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 04:54:59 GMT

My earlier post on "DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration" generated some good comments...

re: DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration

kid — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 17:29:31 GMT

I think that many of our "Linux Friends" who are referring to this as "sparkle" do not truley understand the power of UI and the typical user experience. Most times these folks are writing backend processes that most typical users would never even concieve let alone use. Linux based use-case studies are many times based on an open source programming community that does not accurately reflect how a typical computer user tries to use a computer.

In some of these blogs Greg talks about a crack UI team that he has working for them that would not allow them to map a minimize function to a spinning cylander. Many times these types of teams pull from UI experience that started out in traditional printed media, television and then on up to modern day computing. They study why the human eye does the things that it does and relate that back to the way that we are all trained to read as young children.

Anyone that claims that this is just simple "sparkle" is probably speaking from a lack of experience in the field of UI design. Many times it seems that these folks are so involved with competing or showing up Microsoft that they forget that 100's of years of collective experience and thought has gone into this stuff for a rock solid reason.

I am very thrilled about the whole thing!

re: DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration

kid — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 17:30:42 GMT

I would like to know if we can drag and drop the tasks running in the taskbar around to put certain tasks in certain order all the time. This is something that I have wanted for some time, it is a personalation feature that would allow me to more consistantly operate the computer.

re: DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration

kabage — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 10:21:39 GMT

Being a Gentoo Linux user myself, I'm surprised how many times I've seen the word Linux in this, blog. Not bad considering their advertising budget. But I know "my win friends", here don't get it. "It" being the thousands of hours
being put into linux development everyday.

Besides the "sparkle" and I know the average home
computer user, uses their computer for strictly entertainment purposes. The more bling the better. That is exactly why, you heard it here first, "Xgl and linux will be a historical watershed for linux." Not that this technology is much differnt than described here. The "Linux noobs" appearing in Gentoo is amazing, for alpha software? Already "Plugins" are being developed faster than I can keep up. 1000's of web pages can be found since the release of these technologies by Suse in Jan.
By the time this technology comes to stable, "go figure" probably about the same time as Vista, there will probably be 100+ plug-ins for
"sparkle".

But don't worry there won't too much lose to win users. 10-100 million in advertising you probably wont lose more than 1-2% of win users.

Thats a watershed event to me.

Ready, get set, ..

re: DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration

[ICR] — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 22:01:59 GMT

While all this work is very impressive and will certainly go a long way in making the user experience in Vista alot more solid, it should be noted (and this is directed at kabage primarily) this is only a part of the whole user experience that Vista is focussing so keenly on. Dialogs, options and the likes are all being very carefuly crafted, worded and created. As well as other UI elements. This whole experience is what will build up to an out-of-the-box solid feeling, user freindly easy to use experience.
This is something I've not found in any Linux variation I've used. And that is why alot of people haven't made the move to Linux.

Desktop Window Manager Index of Post Topics

Greg Schechter's Blog — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 21:43:00 GMT

Here's a list of topics that I have posted on (with active links) or expect to post on (without links)...

DWM & Aero Glass at work

David Boschmans Weblog — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 14:01:36 GMT

When talking about WPF during the Windows Vista ISV Touchdown training a lot of people were interested...

DWM & Aero Glass at work

David Boschmans Weblog — Thu, 31 May 2007 16:58:22 GMT

When talking about WPF during the Windows Vista ISV Touchdown training a lot of people were interested

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DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration

UI Faux Pas

re: DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration

re: DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration

re: Performance and XGL

re: DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration

re: DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration

Responding to Comments from &quot;DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration&quot;

re: DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration

re: DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration

re: DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration

re: DWM's use of DirectX, GPUs, and hardware acceleration

Desktop Window Manager Index of Post Topics

DWM &amp; Aero Glass at work

DWM & Aero Glass at work

Greg Schechter s Blog DWM s use of DirectX GPUs and hardware | Shed Kits

Greg Schechter s Blog DWM s use of DirectX GPUs and hardware | Outdoor Ceiling Fans

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DWM & Aero Glass at work