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- OpenGL and Windows VistaJuly 27 2007
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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.
- The results are inJuly 27 2007
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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