GPU framebuffer and geometry off-load ...
I'm just wondering anybody upgrade yet and if so what do they think....i heard the 3-d icons/tabs are great
It's more than visual "eye candy," it's performance (at least when done correctly).
First off, the GPU (graphical processor unit) is more powerful than your CPU (central processor unit) at many operations.
Secondly, the common "Window Manager" (WM)
inefficiently maintains graphical widgets, especially overlays of components.
Third, the concept of "overlaying 2D planes" is an elemental 3D managementD -- 2D planets of "textures" (pixelated output).
Apple QuartzExtreme
Apple and it's Cocoa widget toolkit is at the heart of Aqua, with Quartz its rendering engine -- Cocoa is "very clean" in design.
QuartzExtreme merely leverages OpenGL to put many operations of Cocoa and Aqua into the GPU's framebuffer, and leverage its abilities.
It basically can do "extra stuff for free" without any performance loss.
"Open Systems" GLX and AIGLX
The X-Window (largely UNIX/UNIX-like) world is a bit less simplistic, and there are many Window Managers.
The Xt (X toolkit), GTK+ (GIMP Toolkit) and Qt (TrollTech Qt) toolkits are all X11 (X-Window version 11) widgets.
X11 itself is very extensible, but there are an endless set of extensions (including remote network display).
But for a long time, a common extension for X11 was GLX (OpenGL over X11).
GLX can off-load just about everything, although it takes a completely GLX-based Windows Manager to do this.
That is what Xgl does, and various Window Managers like Compiz, Beryl and others offer goodies.
The downside is that it requires quite a bit of GPU horsepower to do everything X11 does, so it requires a bit more juice than QuartzExtreme.
The Accelerated Interdirect GLX (AIGLX) approach seems to be catching on thanx to Red Hat and select others.
It uses traditional X11 and then only leverages GLX (via AIGLX extensions in the X11 driver, which then off-loads to hardware-accelerated LibGL) as wanted.
It's the "leanest" solution of them all, although it only has support of a few vendors so far (Intel, nVidia, etc...), although some "unoptimized" open source drivers do "pick-up-the-slack" (like older, non-ATI drivers for ATI cards).
Microsoft WGF
NOTE: In a previous post, I referred to WGF 1.1 as GDI 1.1, I meant WGF 1.1
The new Microsoft Graphics Foundation (WGF) is a completely new set of underlying components that do away with the legacy Graphical Device Interface (GDI) approach to GPU framebuffer. WGF 1.1 in Vista's release is based on DirectX 9, and still has serious geometry setup deficiencies compared to even older OpenGL 1.x releases (let alone still no "remote 3D display" concept like GLX has since day 1). But it does help "off-load" both newer and legacy GDI operations to the GPU, using Citrix MultiWin virtualization (until Citrix created MultiWin, standard in all NT5/Win2000+ releases GDI applications required a physical 2D display and framebuffer -- this was a personal decision and fuck-up by Gates himself, overriding brilliant architects from Digital, Xerox**, etc...), especially with the new components that make up the "Aero" interface.
**Xerox invented the GUI, including one of the most efficient GUI approaches for humans (tab/tile-based window layout) which is still not widely adopted (in favor of overlapped windows)
But until things are written to newer, pure WGF-based WinForms -- let alone many geometry deficiencies are addressed in a DirectX 10-based WGF 2.0 (which many of predict will become vapor due to WGF 1.1's "hacks" that won't be easily duplicated), it's very, very sluggish and not recommended. Only "pure" Aero components perform decent on modern hardware -- and to
make matters much worse -- just like NT 4.0 over 10 years ago (with the adapted 95 Explorer interface), you have to have a graphics card with 3x the performance
just to run the "legacy," pre-Aero interface because WGF 1.1 is still being used underneath for the "legacy" Explorer shell. It's the biggest example of
how grossly inefficient WGF-Aero is for legacy Windows applications.
And considering that even MS Office 12 (2007) is still a
legacy Windows application, as is
100% of Microsoft's new Vista apps, the WGF-based Aero shell is going to suck for normal usage for some time.
E.g., What takes Windows Vista a NV44 (nVidia GeForce 6100/6200) series or a very fast NV30 (nVidia GeForce FX5800/5900) to do with WGF 1.1 can be done with QuartzExtreme or AIGLX on a NV11 (nForce 2 MX), although probably more of a NV17/25 (nForce 4 MX/Ti) for pure GLX. We're talking literally 4.5 years (6 minor/3 major GPU generations) of difference in performance.
