Windows 8 Trounces Windows 7 Desktop Performance With Hardware Acceleration
Have you been running any of the Windows 8 release previews – or betas – and thought they seemed faster than your trusty Windows 7? You’re not imagining it. Microsoft is aggressively using DirectX hardware acceleration to significantly speed up the desktop – much more than in Vista or Windows 7 – which for once is something very positive to report about Windows 8, compared to all the negativity surrounding the enforced use of the controversial Metro interface.
To improve the speed smoothness and responsiveness of the desktop, Microsoft looked at these key areas: app’s use of hardware acceleration; text acceleration, geometry rendering, image rendering and efficency improvements when redrawing just parts of the screen. They also explain the importance of maintaining a smooth 60 frames per second rendering speed at all times, something which high performance gamers are only too aware of, but the general public are not. There’s a lot of technical detail at the Microsoft blog, below.
Glitch count – While frame rate is an important metric, it doesn’t tell the whole story. For example, running a benchmark for 10 minutes and getting 60 FPS on average sounds perfect. But, it doesn’t tell us how low the frame rate might have dropped during the test. For example, if the frame rate dips down to 10 FPS momentarily during demanding parts, the animations will stutter. The glitch count metric looks for the total number of times that rendering took more than 1/60 of a second, thus resulting in a reduced frame rate. It also looks at the number of concurrent frames missed. The goal here is to have no missed frames during animations.
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