Post #12,789
10/10/01 9:54:27 PM
|
Windows UI Trivia.
The entire "Start Menu" interface is totally done in software. Absolutely no hardware acceleration.
This includes all the fancy UI kipple (fading/rolling out menus) that shows up in Win2k and Office 2k - and the ENTIRE themes system is done in software, with no extensibility for hardware acceleration in WinXP.
Yipe.
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
|
Post #12,853
10/11/01 5:56:43 AM
|
And this is a surprise?
Who knows how empty the sky is
In the place of a fallen tower.
Who knows how quiet it is in the home
Where a son has not returned.
-- Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)
|
Post #12,878
10/11/01 10:30:07 AM
|
Nope...
...but it sure is fun to have confirmation.
BTW - the reason there aren't any multiple CD changers any more has to do with Explorer behavior. Any time you launch it, it queries ALL local drives - including the currently "not loaded" drives of the CD changer, causing it to cycle through each drive letter. There is no way around this, so the CD changer companies stopped trying to sell to the consumer market.
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
|
Post #12,982
10/11/01 4:28:50 PM
|
Or you can....
... just place any CD in the changer slots. Make a small CDR disk and put it in as a holder, then shuffle them in and out as you try and load CDs that you auctially need?
Picking up the pieces of my broken life.
|
Post #12,994
10/11/01 4:56:26 PM
|
Still
It would go through the process of checking each tray, taking more time than most like to wait. whether readable or not, the process of changing trays mechanically takes time, and this happens any time you open exploder.
~~~)-Steven----
|
Post #13,015
10/11/01 5:31:44 PM
|
Same thing
Same thing happens if you have drives mounted over a network connection. It's horribly annoying that you have to wait for several minutes for Explorer to open just so you can disconnect the drives that where cut off when the modem disconnected.
Jay
|
Post #13,016
10/11/01 5:34:00 PM
|
Thank God for cmd.exe...
...it's the only way to get around that crap.
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
|
Post #13,013
10/11/01 5:28:47 PM
|
Almost no hardware level at all
Even at the low level, very little of the Windows GUI is hardware accelerated. The Windows cursor is probably the only part you see. Basically everything else is done by drawing into a frame buffer without any hardware support at all. There are a handful of low level graphics primitives that can be hardware accelerated, but few of these primitives are commonly used ones.
This is why the market for 2D video cards died, they had all put everything that Windows used in hardware, and had all reached the limit of resolution that anybody could actually use, and where all faster then Windows could keep up anyway. Thus price and odd ball features like TV-out became the only way to differentiate 2D video.
Part of the problem is that the Windows repaint architecture is very crude. It was designed for systems with very dumb video cards and very limited memory. Thus it doesn't try to do anything clever, nor is it setup to take advantage of any abilities that the hardware would provide.
When Windows first took off, there where actually special 2D video cards that had abilities that windows didn't use. The one I remember off the top of my head is that some video cards had build in hardware scrolling rather then the software level used by Windows even today.
Jay
|
Post #13,053
10/11/01 9:44:57 PM
|
I thought they could.
I tbought there were hooks in GDI that enabled a video card driver to implement a lot of things in hardware. Like scrolling and fast blitting.
I remember an old benchmarking program - WinTach it was called - that was visibly faster on 2D accelerated cards.
Wade.
"All around me are nothing but fakes
Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
|
Post #13,355
10/15/01 1:16:28 PM
|
There is some
There is some hardware acceleration, enough that having hardware acceleration was very important back when a high speed computer was a 486. But it does less then most people believe, it doesn't have real hardware scrolling or other advanced features and even the features it does have are often partially or stupidly implemented. There are hardware level line drawing and blitting routines, hardware cursors and font support, possibly other I can't remember.
You can see the lack of hardware scrolling by quickly scrolling a complex window up and down. If you computer is fast enough you may need to load it down a bit before you can see this effect. Right around the edge of the screen you can see Windows quickly draw in stuff. The background is solid, because that is hardware level blitting, but the higher level stuff is drawn on the screen by windows. With real hardware scrolling, Windows could draw into the section of the screen before scrolling it into view, so you would never get flicker around the edge of a scrollable windows.
You can see much the same effect by having multiple windows open and moving them around over top of each other. In a smarter system with better hardware support this wouldn't cause any flicker because each application would have their own virtual buffer space independent of each other.
Jay
|
Post #13,054
10/11/01 9:52:07 PM
|
That explains some behavior I've seen.
Win 2K on some very fast machines... the context menus were excrutiatingly slow.
Right click. Wait. Click on sub menu. Wait. etc.
Regards,
-scott anderson
|
Post #13,089
10/12/01 7:19:43 AM
|
There are a couple other candidate explanations for that:
Scott Malraw: Win 2K on some very fast machines But then they ought to have been able to handle this at least *somewhat* snappily, if it's done in these, as you say, very fast CPUs. the context menus were excrutiatingly slow. Step 1: If they are on, turn off all the cutesy "menu effects", fading etc, in your Desktop Properties (I think it was; or TweakUI?) -- maybe you're *asking* it to draw them slowly. Step two: If these context menus were in Explorer (the file manager, not IE), then unmap all unreachable or slow network and removable drives -- maybe it's the code *behind* the menus that's slow, not the menus themselves. Just stumbled across the second of these yesterday, on /. IIRC. And the first one recently, installing / configuring W2K... HTH!
Hmm... "excruciatingly", no? Christian R. Conrad
The Man Who Knows Fucking Everything
|
Post #13,228
10/14/01 6:18:09 AM
|
Re: There are a couple other candidate explanations for that
The "cutesy" effects just slow it down further ...
I have all the crap turned off and it's STILL slow as hell ...
For me anyway, I had to modify how I used a web browser ... When my firm's default browser was Communicator, I had turned off all the toolbars and address bar to free up screen real-estate and used the "Context" menu to navigate back-n-forth ...
Now since they switched over to IE 5.5 I have to at least keep the main toolbar enabled to go b-n-f as the context menu is terrible slow ...
And why does right-clicking on a network drive in Explorer (not IE) to disconnect it still seem to take forever ??? We have well over 50 different servers thruout the firm ... My default mappings I use are few so as to NOT slow down opening and using Explorer ... but during the day I do a lot of temporary mapping as needed so I need to dis-connect pretty regularly certain drives ... I right-click, and seem to have to wait forever for the context menu to appear ...
Someone mentioned how there's no "speedup" with the current generation of 2D video cards ... I tend to agree ... I remember when I used a Diamond SpeedStar Pro with Windows 3.x (the old frame-buffer card) ... Diamond's drivers were EXTREMELY fast when running at 800 x 600 ... granted I'm now running 1024 x 768 but I'd think with today's later hardware it would fly ... especially under Windows XP ... but it sucks terribly ... The default drivers for the ATI Rage 128 Pro series of cards doesn't even support directX ... I had to go back to ATI's windows 2000 drivers under XP to be able to run Descent 3 ... seems pathetic to me ...
Greg
|
Post #13,234
10/14/01 2:50:43 PM
|
One less toolbar for IE
you can use the backspace key to go back and alt-right arrow key (does it have a name?)to go forward
happy surfing
A
Play I Some Music w/ Papa Andy
Saturday 8 PM - 11 PM ET
All Night Rewind 11 PM - 5 PM
Reggae, African and Caribbean Music
[link|http://wxxe.org|http://wxxe.org]
|
