Windows 7 to feature GPU acceleration like Apple's Snow Leopard?

A first true glimpse of Windows 7, Microsoft's Vista successor, is T minus 1 day and counting. So far we know very little. Oh sure, it supports multi-touch and takes 1,000 engineers to code but the real details will emerge from Tuesday's kickoff to the PDC 2008 developer conference. As detailed by TG Daily, the PDC track notes dedicate 22 of the 155 tracks to Windows 7 with 2 further dedicated to GPU acceleration under the titles, "Unlocking the GPU with Direct3D," and "Writing Your Application to Shine on Modern Graphics Hardware." Interesting times given Apple's announced OS X Snow Leopard support for OpenCL GPU acceleration in partnership with new best buds, Nvidia, and Intel planning to kill off the GPU entirely. Somebody has to be wrong.

[Thanks, Jeelz]

[Saad Rabia @ Oct 27th 2008 6:38AM]

Apple Snow Leopard includes GPU Acceleration just Like Windows' Vista.

[lurch_mojoff @ Oct 27th 2008 7:12AM]

I think you are confusing the kind of "GPU acceleration" in question with the GPU accelerated window server (i.e. UI) that Vista sports. The thing in Vista is akin to Quartz or Compiz - drawing the windows as textures on a 3D surface, while the thing allegedly coming in Windows 7 is about doing general purpose computation on the GPU (akin to nVidia CUDA).

[Ruben @ Oct 27th 2008 7:24AM]

He could also be talking about Cuda, which exists only on Windows and Linux.

Sure, it isn't made by Microsoft, but neither is OpenCL.

[Boards of Canada @ Oct 27th 2008 7:27AM]

Naz... the smell is what happen when people actually work with there computers. Its not all about shinny gadgets and show-off.

[James Boswell @ Oct 27th 2008 7:53AM]

Ruben, CUDA exists on OSX

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_get.html

Needs 10.5.2 or later, and there it is. (hit the dropdown box)

[JerkfacedFed @ Oct 27th 2008 9:37AM]

Saad, you're wrong, and lurch is right. Vista's desktop is drawn in 3d mode, one of the biggest advancements from XP. This is talking about bringing a GPGPU API to Windows 7, think massive threading brought forth by .NET/DirectX, and able to be used by any app. This will surely bring a resurgence for a want for high powered hardware for rich desktop apps, and a shift away from crappy netbooks, integrated graphics, and lame web apps.

[sburko @ Oct 27th 2008 9:45AM]

Dear, Dear Engadget,
I understand that there are some biased opinions on mediums out there. Cough, Fox. But In your case I really am sick of it. This is nothing more than relentless Microsoft/Vista bashing, it's arrogant, unprofessional and could be considered yellow journalism. I even voted for you in the best gadget blog, or whatever it is. Now I want that vote back, this is a disgusting display of "fanboy-ism". So consider this my indefinite last post and visit to mac-gadget, I mean iNgadget. You see where this is going. Everyone on the comments section agrees, cut the crap. You have a great site, but you ruin it with this level of...I have no other word than bullshit.

Much luv,
Burko

[JerkfacedFed @ Oct 27th 2008 9:52AM]

Sorry Saad I misread your comment youre not wrong, thought you were apple fanboying. Haha :)

Totally agree with sburko on this one. It is totally unprofessional that these editors are all biassed bloggers and not true journalists. Anyone can read an article and put their ignorant mac friendly spin on any "good for Microsoft" news, but it is WRONG.

THOMAS RICKER I AM LOOKING AT YOU. STOP THE BS.

[Paul Chapel @ Oct 27th 2008 10:25AM]

Actually, Vista copied Quartz Extreme from OS X, which was introduced in version 10.2 back in 2002, when Microsoft was still running around trying to plug holes in XP's securtiy. As a PC user, I wish I could claim that Microsoft innovated here, but the truth is the truth and fanboys like Saad only do a disservice to the users who want Microsoft to step up their game and stop copying Apple for once and be a leader in the industry again.

Snow Leopard takes the GPU one step further by allowing any and all applications to run from the GPU, even sidestepping the CPU in a lot of cases, so that OS X can run the primary operating system, unencumbered in the background.

[OneLove @ Oct 27th 2008 10:49AM]

Some people are so sensitive. I am still waiting for my event viewer to stop filling up with errors and ehrecvr.exe to stop crashing when I start my machine. Microsoft needs some bashing.

[Zak @ Oct 27th 2008 11:36AM]

Saad: Again, like always, no. You're completely wrong. Again. Vista has GPU acceleration just like OS X did 5 years ago. You fail horribly at understanding what this article is about. Here's a hint, look up OpenCL, it will probably be very illuminating for you. This is the technology Microsoft is now going to copy in Windows 7.

Except of course that OpenCL is, well, open. Windows 7 technologies are proprietary.

[happy_penguin @ Oct 27th 2008 2:06PM]

Fanboys please.....

I google "GPU accelerated applications" and the first hit is this article with not much of anything else. I added "in Windows" to the search and still no luck. I thought this was a totally new thing? First Saad gets a highest rank for saying that Vista already supports this, then JerkfacedFed gets a highest rank for disagreeing. Then shortly after that JerkfacedFed gets a highest rank for retracting his previous statement. WTF???

Could someone help a brotha out and 'splain to me what I'm missing?

[Saad Rabia @ Oct 27th 2008 3:42PM]

happy_penguin, Windows Vista includes what is called the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which allows to create much more rich software UI with 3D and 2D effects. All graphics (including desktop items like any window) are Direct3D applications, and routing the graphics through Direct3D allows Windows to offload some graphics tasks to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) found on the computer's graphics card. This can reduce the workload on the computer's Central processing unit (CPU), AKA GPU acceleration.

For more information, visit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundation#Features

[Saad Rabia @ Oct 27th 2008 3:50PM]

To understand WPF even much further, try this application on your Vista machine (Hit the link to run the App):

http://www.thirteen23.com/labs/winfx/downloads/publish/nostalgia/nostalgia.application

And visit this link for more WPF Apps:

http://www.thirteen23.com/experiences/desktop/

Enjoy some eye pleasing goodness. :)

[happy_penguin @ Oct 27th 2008 4:10PM]

Thank you for that, Saad. So I assume that the announced GPU acceleration for Snow Leopard is essentially the same thing that Windows Vista already does. In fact, I read this at the link you provided:


"WPF is included with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, and is also available for Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later, and Windows Server 2003."


So you could have even said that it's supported in Windows XP. Unfortunately for now I will have to wait to test that on my machine at home as our Windows XP machines here at work are locked down tight for business. Also, if I can't try that out in Windows XP I guess I'll have to wait until I get on a Vista machine. As far as I know right now, nobody I know personally is running Vista. Most of us are content with Windows XP or OSX.

As for what I thought was different and new, I thought it had something to do with utilizing the GPU for totally non graphical processing. Is that what is happening here or did I dream that up somewhere? It's not really clear to me.

[El Taco @ Oct 27th 2008 6:47PM]

@sburko

If you think the posts are bad, have you even heard the podcast? It's disgusting!

[whiskey @ Oct 27th 2008 9:39PM]

So what you all mean to say is that even with my GPU working to do OS stuff and my CPU already on it... All that power and Vista still couldn't run reliably?

It's the end of an era (me thinks anyway). Granted, Microsoft innovated in plenty of stuff, i just don't find that all that innovation was geared towards an efficient use of the hardware it was installed on. To call it something, it didn't degrade gracefully. Macs don't have that trouble because you would know when it's time to buy a new Mac (and also you would need even more money to get a newer one than a new PC). And Linux can do all those things but, alas, it's still rough around the edges (just where the customers pass their fingers over)...

Microsoft Windows 7 must better take care of what Vista was lacking, it wasn't innovation, it must be more intuitive because if you are going to have too much hassle (and more of the same troubles that plague Windows) then consumers might get tempted to switch to any other OS (Haiku anyone? Or maybe Amiga? BeOS?).

Apple won't be an option when price is not an option (if you don't have much you won't be able to spare for one). If Apple releases it's OS outside their hardware or if they prepared low cost alternatives, they might definitively dent Microsoft's marketshare.

Linux might (just might) become that OS IF somebody finds a middle ground between the ultratechnical and the dumbed down and incomplete... The distro that gets it right (and finds a hardware distributor to call it a combo) will make money, and a serious dent on Microsoft's marketshare.

Go Microsoft, i want to be wowed this time for real. Go Apple, release OSX so we don't need Hackintoshes. Go Linux, refine yourselves. Competition is what makes innovation. Everything else is just FUD from fanboys.

[loosely_coupled @ Oct 28th 2008 2:02AM]

ENOUGH WITH ALL THE CONFUSION!

Here are the facts:
When Engadget wrote "GPU acceleration", they really meant "GPGPU" which expands to "general-purpose computing on graphics processing units". Also known as "stream processing", it refers to the concept of utilizing GPUs for arbitrary data processing instead of being restricted to just 3D graphics. As graphics chips have evolved over the last decade, they have switched from being specialized, fixed-function graphics hardware to flexible, highly-programmable parallel processors.

Both nVidia and AMD/ATI have been developing and marketing SDK solutions that allow programmers to take advantage of the massive computational capabilities of GPUs for data-parallel processing (think audio/video encoding/decoding/processing, graphics manipulation, molecular modeling, scientific computing and simulations, Oil/Gas geo-engineering, visualization, etc.). Although Nvidia's "CUDA" SDK has seen some popularity, the future of GPGPU will most likely be in standardized libraries like. Apple is pushing their "OpenCL" standard for OSX 10.6 "Snow Leopard", and Microsoft is pushing DirectX11's "computational shaders" for the same purpose.

also, "Saad" is simply talking about traditional graphics acceleration of the user interface in OSX and Vista.

[Mark @ Nov 20th 2008 9:44AM]

Trying to make a GPU do general purpose tasks is trying to use a hammer as a screwdriver. You might be able to do it, but it's not optimal. And probably involves screwing around writing shaders to do tasks.

Screw the GPU and start supporting proper dedicated processors. Something like Toshiba's cell should be in every PC - . It would mean screaming performance for audio / video codecs, compression, crypto, physics etc.

[naz @ Oct 27th 2008 6:39AM]

it better be good to cover up the smell of vista

[Esat Dedezade @ Oct 27th 2008 6:45AM]

Freshly fried donuts?

[suhag @ Oct 27th 2008 9:18AM]

mmm....donuts

[Kris @ Oct 27th 2008 6:43AM]

Windows Vista includes GPU Accelerated applications... where have you been, Engadget? Just like your last article, this one smells like it was created only to bash Microsoft for no good reason.

Ugh

[jon @ Oct 27th 2008 2:47PM]

yeh, seriously. And even if vista didnt have it, did we realy have to compare it to snow leopard.

[KarlW @ Oct 27th 2008 7:12AM]

Really? Vista includes GPU accelerated _applications_? I must have missed that.

It has a GPU accelerated windowing engine (DWM), but I've not heard of any applications running code in a CUDA-type way through OS features. Oh, and both OSX and Linux had GPU-accelerated windowing ages before Vista. There is no GPGPU SDK in Vista as far as I'm aware.

It's good that Microsoft is going to include GPGPU in DirectX 11. I just wish they would work with Apple on standards - OpenCL is designed to be a standard (only insofar as that Apple is calling Microsoft's bluff - they know Microsoft won't accept it or work with it, so they'll claim it's 'open' and be open source heroes).

[Ruben @ Oct 27th 2008 7:22AM]

Considering there will be more applications using DX11 General Acceleration than there will be using OpenCL even years after its released, I wouldn't call OpenCL the standard.

The standard OpenGL has gone really far, has it not?

In the end, there are not going to be many applications that will even need either DX11 or OpenCL. It seems hard enough to write an encoder that uses the GPU to encode. I'm still waiting for that to come out (in a working fashion).

[KarlW @ Oct 27th 2008 7:39AM]

"The standard OpenGL has gone really far, has it not?"

Actually, it has. Not only is it deeply integrated in to OSX, but it's also on the iPhone, Sony Playstation 2 and 3 and PSP, and forms the backbone for Linux's 3D effects. Pretty much everything that needs 3D or hardware accelerated graphics and isn't from Microsoft uses OpenGL.

DirectX is bad for the industry. It ties developers down to Windows and Microsoft platforms in the same way Microsoft broke internet standards to promote Internet Explorer and kill off Netscape. Forcing people to stay on your platform through proprietary software is bad. Why do you think there aren't many Mac games? DirectX. That might seem like a "competitive advantage", but it's bad for software developers, and means Microsoft don't have much incentive to innovate - developers are tied to their platform whether they do a good job or not.

[adrian @ Oct 27th 2008 8:25AM]

Windows users sure like to complain. If Engdget is so bias, Why continue to visit their site. Many Windows users said Engadget had lost them as readers when the story on the Vista update was released. That did not last long then did it.

[Mark Anderson @ Oct 27th 2008 8:34AM]

@Adrian

I think you're confusing 'complaining' with 'wanting parity'. We also don't want Engadget to become just another Apple sponsored weblog like Gizmodo.

[Vanillacide @ Oct 27th 2008 8:41AM]

Adobe use OpenGL in CS4 for the hardware acceleration.

Although in games, only iD appear to have much love for OpenGL anymore, and everyone else is on DirectX; which is partly why Xbox 360 and PC games are easy to develop together (that an Microsoft's dev environment) whereas PS3 uses OpenGL (and Mac and Linux too).

It's not news that Microsoft planned to bring GPGPU to DirectX 11 API so this should work on Vista too, the questions are:

* Will they use nVidia's CUDA or ATi's CTM approach, or OpenCL, or something proprietary to Microsoft?

* How much integration with the OS? With API being inside DX11 and therefore supported in Vista, can't see much. Apparently Apple are building GPGPU and multi-core CPU support into the OS in such a way that all apps should benefit, rather than ones that specifically call an API.

The other "hot" news is that DirectX will be multithreaded in version 11 to take advantage of multicore CPU -- OpenGL did this ages ago.

[Leindurstit @ Oct 27th 2008 9:17AM]

"We also don't want Engadget to become just another Apple sponsored weblog like Gizmodo."

Too late.

[Major4Play @ Oct 27th 2008 1:35PM]

Windows Movie Maker and DVD Maker are GPU accelerated in Vista.

[Fred @ Oct 27th 2008 6:57AM]

I wonder how much Apple pays Engadget for forcing an OSX comparison into a headline about a Windows feature.

[Ike Turner @ Oct 27th 2008 6:58AM]

WTF you hobos! Vista always had GPU acceleration!

[Bas @ Oct 27th 2008 7:05AM]

What they meant, of course (shame on all of you above) is that it might feature non-graphics accelleration using the GPU. I.e: run normal application code on the GPU. That's what OpenCL is for. The only thing I've seen Microsoft do in this field is releasing a beta of the Microsoft Research project called "Accellerator", which was apperently abandoned somewhere in 2006 (http://research.microsoft.com/Research/downloads/Details/25e1bea3-142e-4694-bde5-f0d44f9d8709/Details.aspx).

So yes, this is something that is not yet supported in Vista (or Leopard for that matter). Apple has announced that Snow Leopard will feature built in support for OpenCL. Hence this article, methinks.

[Bender Bending Rodriguez @ Oct 27th 2008 9:06AM]

I read all those other posts before I go to one person who understand the blog.

[Frobs @ Oct 27th 2008 7:05AM]

someone needs to be fired.

[Rollins @ Oct 27th 2008 9:14AM]

Yeah. All the commenters above stating that Vista already had GPU acceleration (as defined in the article).

[MMaster23 @ Oct 27th 2008 7:05AM]

Yes, these features are coming! Windows 7 is being unveiled today at 8:30AM (LA time).

Also check out this article for more suggested features: http://www.martijnbrant.net/2008/10/windows-7-looking-ahead-at-pdc

[Desides @ Oct 27th 2008 7:07AM]

Leopard already utilizes the GPU for desktop rendering. No need to wait for Snow Leopard.

[Jash Sayani @ Oct 27th 2008 7:09AM]

What MS Claims:
- Better Bluetooth Support
- A new integrated software to control Audio/Video settings
- A new ControlCenter to manage all preferences. (Maybe Control Panel will be like Prefs on OS X)

And some fresh new features that are in SnowLeopard... Such as 32-bit and 64-bit switching....

[Via ZDNet Article]

[Mile @ Oct 27th 2008 7:13AM]

The GPU isn't going anywhere, and I find the sentence as written suggesting it may be gone soon very confusing.

[devil666 @ Oct 27th 2008 7:30AM]

Wow I wonder how much M$ is paying these losers to keep saying 'Vista already has it' and then go and 1+ themselves. Probably the losers in those failure Vista ads. God just delete this article and start again, making special mention that Vista is just as hopeless as everyone ALREADY knows it is. Christ almighty.

[Ike Turner @ Oct 27th 2008 7:34AM]

I knew I should have kicked you mother in the belly 15years ago. Damnit!

[suhag @ Oct 27th 2008 9:22AM]

i hear hangers are much more efficient.

[Marko @ Oct 27th 2008 7:24AM]

Yes, more eyecandy in Windows 7 - Just the thing that I was looking for, and the thing that was missing in Vista...

[Ruben @ Oct 27th 2008 7:27AM]

This is a framework to use the GPU as a processor, one that is much easier to code than CUDA, announced in the summer when they were talking about DX 11.

This has nothing to do with eye candy.

[Boards of Canada @ Oct 27th 2008 7:25AM]

like apple like apple... at least I'll be able to run my applications on windows and my web browser will not crash every 2 hours...

[Marko @ Oct 27th 2008 7:36AM]

shhh
they'll ban you from engadget with that attitude!

[KarlW @ Oct 27th 2008 8:44AM]

Have you ever used internet explorer?

The only decent browsers on Windows are Firefox and Chrome. FF is cross-platform, and Chrome is based on WebKit (i.e. Safari engine). Even IE was better on OSX than Windows (used the MS-developed Tasman engine, which was more standards compliant than Trident)