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by rincebrain19 hours ago |
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upvoteby mwcampbell11 hours ago|
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Your argument presupposes that we should accept escalating baseline hardware requirements as good or even necessary, for a desktop computing world that was, from the user's perspective, doing pretty much the same thing as before. I reject that.
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upvoteby rincebrain17 minutes ago|
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My recollection of current events at the time was that you were already having a dogshit experience using computers for many common things in the XP era with underpowered video hardware and trying anything complex in a browser, or Flash things with a lot of assets, so it's less forcing escalating a baseline and more recognizing the realities of what people were already expecting in a "good" computer and building thing that could take advantage of that.

I would agree it should have degraded much more gracefully and more readily than it did, but I'm quite confident we hadn't hit the point of minimal returns on improvements in hardware that would be necessary for such an argument yet.

Hell, I probably wouldn't make that argument until large amounts of RAM and VRAM (or unified RAM) are ubiquitous, because so many workloads degrade so badly with too little of either.

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upvoteby bombcar18 hours ago|
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Apple had been doing GPU-accelerated GUIs since the early NeXT days; it was certainly possible on hardware weaker than what Vista required.
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upvoteby runjake17 hours ago|
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Minor correction: Apple introduced GPU-accelerated GUI in 10.2 with the introduction of Quartz Extreme.

Display PostScript did not have GPU acceleration, as far as I know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Compositor?#Quartz_Extr...

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upvoteby Zardoz8416 hours ago|
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Windows 3.1, with the aproppiated drivers and modern SVGA card, had accelerated 2d graphics. Accelerated GUIs don't even need GPU or 3d.
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upvoteby ShroudedNight11 hours ago|
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What does "GPU" mean here? Previous uses of the term seemed to imply "dedicated hardware for improving rendering performance" which the SVGA stuff would seem to fall squarely under.
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upvoteby layer810 hours ago|
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The term GPU was first coined by Sony for the PlayStation with its 3D capabilities, and has been associated with 3D rendering since. In some products it stood for Geometry Processing Unit, again referring to 3D. Purely 2D graphics coprocessors generally don’t fall under what is considered a GPU.
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upvoteby ShroudedNight9 hours ago|
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It has been associated with 3D rendering, but given that things like the S3 86C911 are listed on the Wikipedia GPU page, saying "Accelerated GUIs don't need GPU" feels like attempting to win an argument by insisting on a term definition that is significantly divergent from standard vulgar usage [1], which doesn't provide any insight to the problem originally being discussed.

[1] Maybe I've just been blindly ignorant for 30 years, but as far as I could tell, 'GPU' seemed to emerge as a more Huffman-efficient encoding for the same thing we were calling a 'video card'

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upvoteby layer88 hours ago|
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I don’t agree with what you state as the vulgar usage. “Graphics card” was the standard term a long time, even after they generally carried a (3D) GPU. Maybe up to around 2010 or so? There was no time when you had 2D-only graphics cards being called GPUs, and you didn’t consciously buy a discrete GPU if you weren’t interested in (3D) games or similar applications.

In the context of the discussion, the point is that you don’t need high-powered graphics hardware to achieve a fast GUI for most types of applications that WPF would be used for. WPF being slow was due to architectural or implementation choices.

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upvoteby bombcar5 hours ago|
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That's the real takeaway - WPF should have degraded gracefully (read, full speed performance without the bling) but it didn't.
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upvoteby bombcar9 hours ago|
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Most people consider GPU to mean "3D accelerator" though technically it refers to any coprocessor that can do work "for" the main system at the same time.

GPU-accelerated GUI usually refers to using the texture mapping capabilities of a 3D accelerator for "2D" GUI work.

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upvoteby cyberax3 hours ago|
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Calling that "the GPU acceleration" on Mac OS X was a bit overstating the things. It supported rotations, compositing, and some other bulk operations, but text and precise 2D graphics was rendered on the CPU.

It _still_ is not trivial to render high-quality 2D graphics on the GPU.

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upvoteby kalleboo17 hours ago|
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I mean Apple had a GPU-accelerated GUI in 1990, but probably not what we think of "GPU accelerated" these days

https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Apple_Macintosh_Display_Card_8-...

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