Windows 7 and GDI hardware acceleration

[amyat]

Toms Hardware Germany has a couple of articles about the 2d hardware acceleration problems windows 7 has

http://www.tomshardware.com/de/WDM-GDI-WDD...hte-240480.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/de/wddm-2d-per...hte-240487.html

Also the US version has a translation of the first part:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2d-windows-gdi,2539.html

They don't center their findings in GUI drawing, but on basic 2d primitives and blitting, but they come to the same conclusions as the videos in the first post.

Microsoft should bring back 2D hardware acceleration. (it's a shame but I doubt they'll ever move a finger about)

Edited February 7, 2010 by amyat

[vinifera]

i'd like to know why they removed it in first place ...

[amyat]

i'd like to know why they removed it in first place ...

According to the docs linked on the videos the short answer is:

"Microsoft chose software render because they found too difficult to combine the new graphical engine with the old one. "

Full answer: http://blogs.msdn.com/directx/archive/2009...in-windows.aspx

[vinifera]

so lazzyness is answer

[cluberti]

Or paying to shoehorn the old NT 2D subsystem into the new DWM cost too much to be considered fiscally feasible. Laziness usually isn't the answer, driving costs down and keeping revenue up for shareholders in a public company usually means decisions like this come down to cost rather than laziness.

[vinifera]

at the cost(s) of users and their bad experience of OS or games

[cluberti]

I'm not sure it's as big a deal as you're making it out to be (maybe it is, but I don't see a huge outpouring of grief over the 2D subsystem anywhere). While I agree there are some issues, I don't think it's affecting most people. For example, I didn't notice it until it was mentioned in this thread - and it seemed to be video-driver specific too, *AND* specific to Nvidia drivers and newer Radeon 5xxx series cards (which seem to lack almost all 2D features in the driver), meaning it could be poor driver ports from WDDM 1.0 to 1.1 causing it, or just video driver vendor issues. I tried this on my wife's Dell laptop with an Intel integrated 4500 POS, and I couldn't repro any of it there either, for what it's worth.