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Lets talk about DirectX 10 Warp10 Software Rendering

category: general [glöplog]
OK, I know bugger all about DirectX so I might be completely missing the point, but... I cannot think of a single Microsoft product that has faithfully implemented an existing technical standard, certainly not to the point of being a "reference" implementation. Not even for standards that they've invented themselves (Office OpenXML and SMB spring to mind) - so why would we expect this one to do any better?

(Serious question. Not M$-bashing, honest)
added on the 2008-12-02 23:55:12 by gasman gasman
what about C# ? (without APIs)
don't forget that there are many separate development "groups" within MS, some are better than others.

however, does not e.g. intel do this already (i.e. compile shader code via JIT to X86) in their drivers ..?!

(well, and when it comes to SW rendering, a JIT is almost essential if you want to emulate the feature set of todays graphic cards at decent speed..)
added on the 2008-12-03 00:03:17 by xyz xyz
gasman: they're somewhat well known for not sticking to standards that their competitors rely on, be it the old 'embrace and extend' ploy that gave us the current internet standards vs. ie6 mess, or their own ones like (was it the original COM?) that caused wordperfect a few minor incompatabilities back in the day.

Can't see there being much issue with directx though, they're not in competition with ati+nvidia, but rather rely on them.

hermes: yep, intel "support" a lot of opengl (and presumably dx too) in their drivers, but the actual code often runs in software on the cpu.


There's another side of this we've not mentioned so far - I've read that one benefit microsoft sees for this is that if the GPU dies while you're working, the CPU can take over rendering the interface so things continue as normal, but slower.

All good, but can anyone suggest a situation where that might actually happen? If the video card itself suddenly dies, you're not going to get a picture, so software rendering isn't really going to help. And I understood that under vista if the video driver hangs it gets reset automatically, so if that works you'd continue working on the GPU, and if not.. well you're not going to get a picture displayed.

So what does it leave.. better support for people who don't install video drivers?

And how useful is this really going to be beyond the handy reference driver? Better performance in games for people with the fastest CPU on the market paired with an intel gpu?
added on the 2008-12-03 00:33:16 by psonice psonice
first of all, as someone already mentioned, it also guess that it will most likely be used as a reference rasterizer (i.e. for debugging..)
second: if the 32+-core-for-everyone future really turns out to be "true", this might be a good future-investment for ms.. ;)

other than that: boring-- hardware accelerators make more sense in the present. (and yea, what pure-2d accelerators can you still buy today..)

added on the 2008-12-03 00:39:25 by xyz xyz
Quote:
cutting edge Core i7 8 Core

Isn't i7 just 4 cores?
added on the 2008-12-03 01:33:29 by xernobyl xernobyl
Quote:
And I understood that under vista if the video driver hangs it gets reset automatically
As far as my experience with such resets goes when GPU driver gets reset in most cases the acceleration is lost and you must reboot to regain it.
added on the 2008-12-03 01:40:46 by masterm masterm
4 multi-threaded cores. ok. problem solved.
added on the 2008-12-03 01:44:51 by xernobyl xernobyl
masterm: it works, I recently was lucky enough to witniss it (nvidia driver, 6500gt) but it took a minute or longer and I already thought I'd have to reboot..
added on the 2008-12-03 01:49:14 by xyz xyz
witniss=witness..
added on the 2008-12-03 01:49:45 by xyz xyz

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