Next Windows Without Matrox?

[BeeJay]

As stated at http://www.gamespot.com/all/news/news_2912498.html next Windows incarnation internal name "Longhorn" which maybe will be released at end 2004 requires at least a DirectX 9 capable graphics card.
All major companies have shown their roadmaps or announced their DX9 Gfx cards, even companies like S3 and SIS reenter the top-notch market and have them in the lines.
In all price areas DX9 cards will penetrate the market, so a relatively quick adoption can be expected.

But then again, where is Matrox?
Are they follow 3dfx's fate?
I guess it's then ATI's turn to buy Matrox

I think the most a company can do is to be innovative, transparent and hear the users needs.

[leech]

Ugh, Longhorn.... I'm staying away from that mess. WindowsXP is my last Windows-based OS I'll ever use.

As long as Matrox provides a good, full-featured linux driver, I'll be happy.

Leech

P.S. The likelyhood of that happening soon, is pretty slim, but I've got to have some hope, right?

[Belwarrior]

if anyone has to buy matrox then let it be ati...
of course knowing matrox.. longhorn might be demo-ed on a matrox part.... hopefully..

[lecter]

Er, the alpha-build actually had Parhelia drivers built-in. And a minimum-requirement DX9 compatibility seems ridiculous, what, Longhorn needs Pixel Shaders 2.0? Come on....

[Faramir1966]

Well...i believe that article has been miss-read.
They say that Longhorn will use 3d elements in the new desktop,but no word that you will need DX9 for that.......

[Chrono_Wanderer]

LOL... that's pretty rough on the gfx card

[UtwigMU]

Firstly, current alpha builds are still far from even release candidates.

We're still a year and a half to two years from release, so the requrements and videocards will certainly shift by then.

A year ago I heard the rumour about GeForce 4 to be minimum, DX9 seems to be requirement by now.

And since Matrox has released a new card every year, they have at least two releases untill Longhorn.

Or like some Murcer said: Parhelia II will power Longhorn on corporate desktop.

[leech]

I don't know, are they planning on doing something like this?

Leech

[WyWyWyWy]

Originally posted by leech
I don't know, are they planning on doing something like this?

No they're not
But the 2D desktop "effects" would be drawn with DX9.
Such as alphatransparency and even moving a window... all will be done via DX9 hardware accelerated by gfx card!

[leech]

Yeah, I know, I was being sarcastic . That's good and all that they decided to try and make their OS force people to upgrade their hardware. But then again, it's not like MS hasn't done that many times before. You'd think as they released newer operating systems it'd be more optimized, with new features, rather than being LESS optimized with buggy features.

Leech

[SteveC]

Longhorn (Milestone 4 anyway) runs on a G100 in software mode and on a G450 quite happily

[DGhost]

Last i checked none of the Milestones even have GDI+ 2.0 in them or enabled.

And yes, it is called GDI+ 2.0. Windows XP currently uses GDI+ 1.2, last I checked. The Parhelia lists support for GDI+ 2.0 on their spec sheet. Although they also listed VS2.0 support, which has yet to be seen.

It is doing pretty much the same thing that Quartz Extreme in MacOS X and Evas in Enlightenment 0.17.x for X11.

Further, not only will window drawing be done using 3d acceleration (which can be quite a few times faster than standard 2d acceleration), it also does some nice things like page flipping only on vsync and making things like GUI effects and video overlays much less of a hack to implement on a driver level (and things like dragging a blended window over a video overlay will still render right). It also gives Windows the ability to cache what was last drawn and use that in case the application doesn't respond to a redraw message.

lemme see... there are a bunch more things it does... stuff like automatically caps the redraw rate of the screen to 1/2 of the refresh rate unless an application specifically requests faster (iirc).

oh yeah, it doesn't require a DX9 compliant card, only a DX9 compatable card (ie, the drivers have to be updated to DDI9 - you cannot use old DX7 or DX8 drivers with them. Sorry folks with Voodoo's, Kyro's and pretty much any Matrox card out there right now. Hopefully this will change with the Parhelia series, but who knows.) It does, however, require tons and tons of memory bandwidth. TONS. Each window adds to how much memory bandwidth is in use, and last I checked every window gets redrawn every time the screen is rendered, so the amount of bandwidth is needed is increased with each window.

The Parhelia is on paper nicely suited for it, but however it appears that the memory controller is a rather underperforming in the real world (Matrox also has a legacy of underperforming memory controllers, so its not that big of a suprise). Any ATI part with a 256bit memory controller will likely be quite nice with it. In addition, NVidia's nForce2 IGP's will likely perform fairly nicely for integrated graphics solutions, along with Intel's upcoming integrated graphics chipsets. And people laughed at the idea of Dual-DDR memory controllers.

I also believe that all displays in the system have to be able to provide 1024x768x32bit for it to enable at all. I'll post more when I can recall more tasty morsels.

[leech]

Is Enlightenment .17.x ever coming out? They've been working on that forever and a day now (though some of the earlier stuff I have seen is amazing).

My thoughts on all of this..... One more way that Microsoft is making older hardware useless and forcing people to upgrade to use their 'latest and greatest' OS. While on the other side of the spectrum, you have something like the Debian project that tries real hard to maintain a system that is runnable on a 386. (not that I'd try to run Gnome or KDE on a 386).

Most of this sounds more like just bloat to me. Do we really NEED all this? Will it actually add functionality to the Windows OS line? (I'm the type of person that got sick of the new WinXP theme real quick and always the first thing I do when I set up windows is set it to the Windows Classic theme, which is sad, 'cause that's why I had hopes for WindowsXP in the first place.... but it's just not as nice looking as some of those GTK and QT themes.)

Leech

[Slougi]

Originally posted by leech
Is Enlightenment .17.x ever coming out? They've been working on that forever and a day now (though some of the earlier stuff I have seen is amazing).

Check out /., they had a story on it a few days ago. evas is almost complete, and having used it, I must say it is a dream OpenGL accelerated desktop, here I come!