Comment by mholt
7 days ago
This isn't just a gaussian blur though, there's raytracing and refractions happening. The OS is becoming a low-key high-fidelity video game.
7 days ago
This isn't just a gaussian blur though, there's raytracing and refractions happening. The OS is becoming a low-key high-fidelity video game.
I don't usually say things are bloated but raytracing buttons is something I'd expect to be a parody...
And all of this just to make the whole UI white and generic.
I just want everything to look like Windows XP. I don't get it.
It’s almost certain to be a fairly cheap thing, at least for a GPU that can sling pixels at the gigabytes per second necessary to get smooth touch scrolling at these screen resolutions.
The demos only show a very limited array of shapes. Precompute the refraction, store the result in a texture, and the gist should be sample(blur(background), sample(refraction, point)). Probably a bit more complicated than this—I’m no magician of the kind that’s needed to devise cheap graphics tricks like this—but the computational effort should be in that ballpark. Compared to on-device language models and such, I wouldn’t be worried.
(Also, do I need to remind you of the absolute disdain directed by 95/98/Me/2000 users at the “toy” default theme of XP? And it was a bit silly, to be honest. It’s just that major software outfits don’t dare to be silly anymore, and that way lies blandness.)
> It’s just that major software outfits don’t dare to be silly anymore, and that way lies blandness
Great observation! We need some of that sillyness back. Everything is all serious and corporate nowadays, even 'fun' stuff like social media or games. Even movies can't be silly anymore.
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>It’s almost certain to be a fairly cheap thing, at least for a GPU that can sling pixels at the gigabytes per second
Okay, but what about the battery connected to the GPU? The battery in my iPhone has already degraded below 80% health in the 2.7 years I've had it, so I'd rather not waste its charge on low-contrast glass effects.
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the Winamp GUI and skins are "silly". This is just boring and bland.
> And all of this just to make the whole UI white and generic.
3:30–3:45 in the video is painful. Describing “giving you an entirely new way, to personalise your experience”, while showing… white. White white white. Oh, and light tinted backgrounds to set your white on. I hope the personalisation you wanted was white.
My conspiracy theory is that dark/light theme was invented by companies to keep users from asking for full customization.
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Make things slow so they can sell more hardware to make it look faster?
I don’t know, just kidding :-)
If GPUs can handle it, I guess why not. It’s some people will notice and say “wow, looks pretty, glad I upgraded”
Hey now, this is Windows Vista. Get it straight!
From what I've seen,the refractions happen in predictable contexts so I suspect that they'll be able to create shaders, etc that will limit the performance hit
Ray tracing is done in shaders these days. Doesn't make it cheap.
The comment you’re replying to probably means “a shader that is a fine approximation of ray tracing (for cheap)”
I would imagine that for a known geometry of glass, you can do the ray tracing once, see where each photon ends up, and then bake that transformation into the UI. If you do this for each edge and curve your UI will produce, you can stitch them together piecewise to form UI elements of different shapes without computing everything again from scratch.
The sampling will still affect performance.
it looks like old school 2D bumpmapping to me, it's not expensive if you don't overengineer it
where do you see raytracing? it's just reading back the texture of the layer behind a bit distorted. honestly that's cheaper than a blur