Windows 7 Graphics Architecture Overview - Part 2

Posted By: Yochay Kiriaty | May 5th, 2009 @ 8:36 AM | 36,250 Views | 1 Comment
Windows 7 includes many new updates and improvements to the Graphics stack, including a new set of APIs for 2D graphics and writing text. Among the improvements are a major reduction in memory consumption by the DWM and new more efficient ways to combine the different available APIs. Join David Blythe, a senior architect in the Desktop and Graphics team, and Yochay Kiriaty, Technical Evangelist for a quick tour of Windows 7 Graphics architecture, its different components, and how they affect and improve the user experience in Windows 7. Discover what’s new in Windows 7 Graphics and how developer can tap into the new APIs.

This is the second of three overview videos and the first in a long series of videos about Windows 7 Graphics.

You can find additional information about Windows 7 Graphics in the:

·         Developer for Windows MSDN page

·         E7 blog post Engineering Windows 7 Graphics Performance

·         PDC session recordings:

·         Windows 7: Writing Your Application to Shine on Modern Graphics Hardware (PDC)

·          Windows 7: Introducing Direct2D and DirectWrite (PDC)

·         Windows 7: Unlocking the GPU with Direct3D

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#May 5th, 2009 @ 4:16 PM
rhm
rhm
The API situation on Windows is out of control.

I'd like to see the look on the faces of the many unsuspecting developers when they get the news about Win7. Good news: we've got a new 2d api to replace GDI that's hardware accelerated and a lot more powerful than both GDI and GDI+ ; bad news: Microsoft wanted to make it part of the DirectX stack, so you have to suffer the ugliness and pain of COM for no obvious reason. 

Of course if COM is too much for you, you can always use WPF, but that's a product of devdiv, not the Windows team, so it has a completely separate rendering pipeline that doesn't integrate with D2D. Oh, and because it was designed by architecture astronauts, even the simplest things will consume hundreds of megs of memory. Which isn't a problem on modern machines... until the garbage collector stops the world to work it's way through it all.

Or you can just carry on using GDI, which still works, although we added some stuff to that too.
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