Ironworks Gaming Forum - View Single Post - Longhorn Re-Invents desktop graphics...

Hivetyrant · 09-07-2004, 08:12 AM

You can read it Here
But for those who want it the easy way..

"What's Up with WGF

For starters, it appears that, as some rumors have suggested, the distinction between vertex and pixel shaders will essentially go away. Instead, there will be what Microsoft is calling a Common Shader Core that will contain vertex and pixel shader operations. Blythe hinted that other kinds of shaders may become available in this framework, though he declined to elaborate as to what those might be. Some possible features that could be added here would be collision detection, and more interestingly, physics calculations. There's been a fair amount of published work coming out of academia about using GPUs' floating-point horsepower to model fluid dynamics, and the movement of gaseous clouds (like smoke).

The line between vertex and pixel shader ops and instructions has been blurring for some time already. There was even some speculation that ATI pushed the R400 out to be the R500 because this architecture was going to try to unify its vertex and pixel shader units. It would appear WGF will lay the groundwork for that unification.

Other major changes call for the GPU to be available to multiple applications simultaneously. Blythe articulated what he termed a "crawl/walk/run" strategy, where an initial feature set would be introduced in WGF 1.0, when Longhorn ships. Other features would be folded in as they became stable and ready for release. For instance, WGF's scheduler will be tasked with keeping multiple 3D applications fed and happy. This scheduler will likely have a three-step rollout:

1. Schedule batches
2. Schedule contexts
3. Preemptive context scheduling

Given Avalon's 3D-centric architecture, this feature will be crucial to keeping Longhorn running smoothly in multitasking environments, where each application requires ready access to its displayed data. We have some concern that the word "preemptive" doesn't appear until the third stage of this rollout. Windows has had a preemptive multitasking model since Windows 95, and that model has worked fairly well. If an application's display processing chores can't preemptively be given higher priority when that app comes into the foreground focus, we wonder if there might be some perceptible latency as other instructions are retired and the in-focus app's processing gets the driver's full attention. The answer to that question will likely have to wait until the Longhorn beta sometime next year."

[ 09-07-2004, 08:13 AM: Message edited by: Hivetyrant ]

09-07-2004, 08:12 AM	#1
Hivetyrant Jack Burton Join Date: August 24, 2002 Location: Aussie now in the US of A! Age: 37 Posts: 5,403	You can read it Here But for those who want it the easy way.. "What's Up with WGF For starters, it appears that, as some rumors have suggested, the distinction between vertex and pixel shaders will essentially go away. Instead, there will be what Microsoft is calling a Common Shader Core that will contain vertex and pixel shader operations. Blythe hinted that other kinds of shaders may become available in this framework, though he declined to elaborate as to what those might be. Some possible features that could be added here would be collision detection, and more interestingly, physics calculations. There's been a fair amount of published work coming out of academia about using GPUs' floating-point horsepower to model fluid dynamics, and the movement of gaseous clouds (like smoke). The line between vertex and pixel shader ops and instructions has been blurring for some time already. There was even some speculation that ATI pushed the R400 out to be the R500 because this architecture was going to try to unify its vertex and pixel shader units. It would appear WGF will lay the groundwork for that unification. Other major changes call for the GPU to be available to multiple applications simultaneously. Blythe articulated what he termed a "crawl/walk/run" strategy, where an initial feature set would be introduced in WGF 1.0, when Longhorn ships. Other features would be folded in as they became stable and ready for release. For instance, WGF's scheduler will be tasked with keeping multiple 3D applications fed and happy. This scheduler will likely have a three-step rollout: 1. Schedule batches 2. Schedule contexts 3. Preemptive context scheduling Given Avalon's 3D-centric architecture, this feature will be crucial to keeping Longhorn running smoothly in multitasking environments, where each application requires ready access to its displayed data. We have some concern that the word "preemptive" doesn't appear until the third stage of this rollout. Windows has had a preemptive multitasking model since Windows 95, and that model has worked fairly well. If an application's display processing chores can't preemptively be given higher priority when that app comes into the foreground focus, we wonder if there might be some perceptible latency as other instructions are retired and the in-focus app's processing gets the driver's full attention. The answer to that question will likely have to wait until the Longhorn beta sometime next year." [ 09-07-2004, 08:13 AM: Message edited by: Hivetyrant ]