Does Windows use hardware rendering?

[ShawnD1]

Does windows use hardware to process its graphics or does it use software rendering? If I'm watching a video in Windows Media Player, I can see my CPU is working but is my video card doing any work? If I choose to have a wallpaper for my desktop, does it lag my CPU or just my video card?

[tmx468]

Unfortunately, as things currently stand, it is CPU work.
Apple currently get the video card to do the work, reducing the CPU's workload. This is being implemented in the new Microsoft Longhorn prototypes.. so we shall wait to see what new blue screen we can end up with!!

[Agent_Embryo]

I think it's because the CPU is doing all the decoding unless you have a hardware decoder card (read MPEG-card) doing it. The graphics card is only rendering. So the CPU is working the hardest. A wallpaper means less available RAM and would probably cause the CPU to work harder, since it has to fetch information from disk more often. Am I right?

[tmx468]

You aren't wrong... it will be interesting to see how Microsoft implement it all - after all, standard graphics cards now have 64Mb minimum - think about it - a slide show for a background, with no loss in performance...

[Agent_Embryo]

I think that Window animations could become fun. I'm waiting for a Windows with full 3D GUI. Or even a full 3D window-manager for Linux, using OpenGL. That would rule.

[OuTpaTienT]

Originally posted by tmx468
- think about it - a slide show for a background, with no loss in performance...

I don't foresee that anytime soon.

When graphics or images are being used by the system, such as being displayed for wallpaper, then they are held in memory in uncompressed form. This means at my desktop resolution (1600x1200) a single image that same size is well over 5Mb. And a slideshow of pics each one being 5Mb won't take very long to eat up all your memory.

[nukes]

I think they were on about 128mb min graphics RAM for the tier 2 system in Longhorn.
In windows at the moment, each program has to refresh its window every frame, and redraw it. Hopefully we will see an improvment in the GDI and toolkits so performance can be increased, and all handled from the windows shell/GDI itself rather than passin control everywhere every frame just to draw the screen.

[ShawnD1]

Sounds like one cool OS. When is longhorn expected to be out?

[nukes]

2004/05 I think. Not for a while yet. And remember that Longhorn is everything that Palladium was, they just changed the name because people were getting wise to what it all meant.
I'll still be on Linux Thank you very much.

[ShawnD1]

Will Linux (KDE) ever have hardware acceleration? My Celeron 500 cannot run KDE effectively because scrolling in things like KWord, Mozilla or even konquerer is really jerky.