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View Full Version : Desktop acceleration the must-have feature that will entice windowers?



NoTiG
September 16th, 2005, 01:02 AM
Full desktop acceleration, where the GUI rendering is translated into opengl calls, exploiting the potential of graphics cards... should speed up the desktop AND give users eye-candy.

Isn't this the big feature that will entice users ?

When vista comes out, it will have this as well.. but it will be expensive and most people will probably keep what they have (XP) .. until they buy new hardware which has vista anyway. But they most likely WILL have high performance graphics cards that will be able to draw their desktop.

I think this is linux's biggest selling point in the near future for casual users.
The lack of spyware is second
ANd when initng is matured, and a faster boot process realized... the fast boot will be the third.

evilghost
September 16th, 2005, 01:04 AM
Ummm, isn't Win32's Desktop already D3D accelerated, and I know there's plans on 3D accelerated X, just can't remember what it's called.

Check out the Linux forum on http://www.nvnews.net

NoTiG
September 16th, 2005, 01:15 AM
No, it uses 2d...

heres a quote of the point im trying to make:


If you look at the floor plan of a modern video chip you will notice a small section labeled 2D. That’s because 90% of the chip is dedicated to the 3D pipeline. You just paid for that 3D hardware so wouldn’t it be nice if the desktop used it. A lot of people don’t realize that 3D hardware can draw 2D desktops. Look at your screen, it’s a flat 2D surface, right? Any picture generated by the 3D hardware ends up as a flat 2D screen. This should lead you to the conclusion that with the appropriate programming 3D hardware can draw 2D desktops.


.David Blythe of the DirectX development team gave a very interesting talk about the upcoming 3D graphics architecture in Longhorn, the next major revision of Windows. Called Windows Graphics Foundation (WGF), this new architecture will usher in some major changes to how 3D graphics operations get handled by Longhorn. These changes extend well beyond Longhorn's Avalon technology, which will render the Windows Desktop using a GPU's 3D graphics processing power rather than the traditional 2D blitter.

NoTiG
September 16th, 2005, 01:18 AM
and I know there's plans on 3D accelerated X, just can't remember what it's called.

Check out the Linux forum on http://www.nvnews.net

You probably mean exa (http://www.virtuousgeek.org/exa-driver.txt)

http://dri.freedesktop.org/~jonsmirl/graphics.html

evilghost
September 16th, 2005, 01:21 AM
EXA is what I was talking about, thanks. :)

gord
September 16th, 2005, 02:51 AM
todays graphics cards with pixel shaders offer a huge ammount of power that could be used extensivly to create some very very nice looking user interfaces, the main reason you don't get really nice looking graphics on your desktop right now is the fact that say you have a desktop running at 1024x768. thats a good 3Mb of data at 32-bit, running that at 60 frames a second totals to a nice 180mb of data. you end up getting speeds that your motherboard just can't move fast enough.

when you move a window or something updates in your graphics now, only the parts of the screen that have updated get uploaded to your video ram, which is why if you have a very slow system, moving large windows about can slow things down or make things jerky.

offloading all this to the graphics card and letting pixel shaders do the sparkle could easly allow for the kind of user interfaces and graphics that we have all been pining over and will hopefully make us think how on earth did we manage with the system we have now :)


sorry if any of the math or whatever up there is wrong, its been a while since i did that kinda stuff ;)

Kyral
September 16th, 2005, 03:17 AM
Honestly the only thing I can see from having a GPU Acclerated Desktop is to take the burden of the graphics of the Desktop off the CPU. I move my windows around and the CPU load spikes. But they have to find some way of making OpenGL open to other apps (like games) even when the acceleration is active. Thats my main dislike towards transset and xcompmgr right now. If I try to run UT2k4 when its active, X crashes.

poofyhairguy
September 16th, 2005, 03:57 AM
I personally have bought two Nvidia cards just to use xcompmgr. I love an accerated desktop, and I use it as often as I can. I only turn it off when I CAN'T have things crash.


Fading windows is prettier than than any minimize trick I have seen.

varunus
September 16th, 2005, 04:16 AM
Is it just me that can't use xcompmgr at all due to Flash crashing whenever I enable the composite extension? Or does no one else use Flash websites very often?

Or is there a fix/workaround for this? Even if i just have the composite extension on, flash crashes the browser, whether i'm using xcompmgr or not...I read somewhere that this was a bug in composite.

I have an intel card using the i810 driver...

NoTiG
September 16th, 2005, 04:50 AM
Honestly the only thing I can see from having a GPU Acclerated Desktop is to take the burden of the graphics of the Desktop off the CPU.

wow, genius here :P

Theoretically desktop acceleration should greatly improve desktop responsiveness since the 3d capablities of your graphics card are so much better than 2d.. as well as relieving your cpu for multitasking.

Kvark
September 16th, 2005, 11:31 AM
Yeah this is a must have for any distro that wants to compete with Vista and Breezy+1 is supposed to compete with Vista so it's a must-have for Breezy+1.

Just hope it can be made smart enough to not render the desktop when the desktop is not visible. Don't want to be rendering both the desktop and a 3D game at once.