An initial investigation into WDDM on ReactOS

15 hours ago (reactos.org)

WDDM is one of the best and most underappreciated parts of Windows IMO. GPU drivers work better on Windows than on any other platform (including macOS with third party GPUs). An embarrassingly large percentage of my problems with Linux over the years can be traced to graphics driver problems that a better driver model could have fixed.

DWM is also an unsung hero of the Windows graphics stack that isn't equalled elsewhere.

  • This is true.

    Microsoft and GPU companies (nvidia, amd, intel mostly, but there obviously were many others) collectively spent literally billions (not a typo - think about the engineer-hours on these multi-million-LOC code bases) on getting the windows graphics driver model mostly right. The amount of tooling is staggering and the fact that a crash in the driver most of the time just causes the screen to blink for a second instead of a bsod is amazing.

  • https://www.yosoygames.com.ar/wp/2015/09/maybe-its-time-to-t... (2015)

    Still seems very relevant.

    • I am not sure if this is relevant because most of the things listed there are not problems anymore. X11 is mostly replaced with Wayland, VSync generally just works, we have lightweight Compositors now. Heck, the other day I was messing with VFIO and for some reason the early GPU grab didn't work, so my system booted in the external GPU instead of the internal GPU, but after booting my VM KDE just flashed because my external GPU was gone but everything went back working without a need for relogin.

      I am not sure about security or how easy it is to hang the system though, I assume those are still true.

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