- Recent
- Popular
- Subscribers (1)
- More OpenGL...April 23 2007
-
Just a quick follow up on Prashant & Michael's OpenGL post, I'd like to point readers to the OpenGL Pipeline newsletter. The Khronos OpenGL ARG Working Group has written a nice article addressing concerns about the performance of OpenGL in Vista:
In the article, they reach three conclusions:
- Windows Vista fully supports hardware accelerated OpenGL;
- OpenGL applications can benefit from Window Vista•s improved graphics resource management;
- OpenGL performance on Windows Vista is extremely competitive with the performance on Windows XP.
We've put a lot of work into optimizing the Vista experience and it's great to see that confirmed by the computing community.
-M
- OpenGL and Windows VistaApril 4 2007
-
Good afternoon,
One area that I get asked about quite a bit is graphics in Windows Vista - most recently, OpenGL. Despite having a graphics background, I'm not too current wrt Vista. To get more info about OGL in Windows Vista, I asked Michael, a PM on the graphics team, and Prashant an analyst who focuses on graphics perf, what the real scoop was. Here's what they had to say:
We get a lot of questions along the lines of “Why did Microsoft drop OpenGL support from Windows Vista?” that leave us scratching our heads. Microsoft doesn’t implement hardware-accelerated OpenGL directly – we offer a mechanism that allows hardware vendors to integrate a hardware-accelerated implementation of OpenGL (called an ICD or installable client driver) that utilizes their hardware into Windows. This has been the case since Windows 2000, and hasn’t changed much in Windows Vista. These ICDs are not included inbox with Windows, and are installed when you get the latest driver package either off a hardware vendor’s website or pre-installed in an OEM machine. The major difference this time around was WDDM, which required that all display drivers be re-written for Windows Vista. This also meant that the OpenGL implementations be re-written, which is something that hardware vendors are continuing to work on as we speak to get the best performance.
- Measuring Performance in Windows Vista (configuring the system)January 30 2007
-
Ok, so it's been a long 'couple of days' since my last post but I haven't disappeared, completely. I'm back from vacation, caught up on email, and starting back into writing about Windows performance. One thing I've noticed over the past week or so is that with the pending General Availability of Windows Vista, we're starting to see more benchmarking of our new OS.
One in particular, over at Tom's Hardware, caught my eye; as a good example of how to do measurement of the OS. Overall, Tom's found that the OS performed pretty well at an application level and that some of the intensive 3D graphics operations weren't quite there, yet. What impressed me most was their methodology. They really understand that some of the changes that we made in Windows Vista to help the user can really wreak havoc with benchmarks.
To quote their article:
Knowing that Windows Vista has its SuperFetch feature, it is important to set up your test system to receive maximum performance that is reproducible... Vista learned about our preferred applications: Microsoft Office Outlook launched noticeably faster, and Skype launched almost instantly ...they are available much more quickly by relocating frequently accessed files from the slow hard drive into the quicker main memory.
Tom's understands that Windows Vista adapts to the user so, to make sure t
- The results are inDecember 14 2006
-
As I said in yesterday’s introduction, my job as an engineer on the Windows Vista team is to improve performance. I wanted to look at a study that measure a key area that we focused on for Windows Vista – consistent responsiveness during the times that matter most to users (when starting up their machine, after being idle, and when you are under the gun running tons of apps, etc.).
To objectively measure how we did, I’ve been working with a company named Principled Technologies. If you’ve been involved in the (admittedly somewhat niche) specialty of perf testing over the last decade you likely know the people if not the company. We commissioned Principled Technologies to develop, run, and document the results of a set of tests that compare the performance of Windows Vista RTM and Windows XP on common business tasks. Today they published their findings here. I am, of course, really excited by the results.
Now you should read the whole report, but I wanted to talk a bit about their key findings:
l “Windows Vista was noticeably more responsive after rebooting than Windows XP on several common business operations.”
As I alluded to, yesterday
- GreetingsDecember 13 2006
-
Hi, all & welcome to the Windows Performance Blog. My name is Matt Ayers and I’m a Program Manager on the Windows Client Performance team. I occasionally write about Windows but I always seem to fall into the ‘always a blogs-maid, never a blogger' category – most recently, I borrowed some space from Tom Archer to talk about ReadyBoost. Well... we've decided to create a perf team blog to talk about key features, technical analysis and other topics near & dear to our hearts. We'll try and have a new topic every few weeks - if there's something you'd like us to talk about, please mail wprfblog@microsoft.com.
Anyhow, to jump right in, let’s chat about one of our major goals for Windows Vista: consistent responsiveness. General customer feedback about XP is that the OS performs pretty well, most of the time… but not necessarily all the time. We found that this inconsistent performance stems from having the wrong data is in memory; put another way, the memory is in a cold state. The most well known cold state occurs right after you start the system but there are many other ways that the system can get ‘cold’.
Another common example would be switching back to an applicat