Comment by rincebrain
20 hours ago
I would argue that was less that WPF was the wrong life choice and more that Microsoft shouldn't have bent the knee to Intel's antitrust push to say their crap hardware was sufficient. [1]
[1] - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vista-capable-de...
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.
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.
Apple had been doing GPU-accelerated GUIs since the early NeXT days; it was certainly possible on hardware weaker than what Vista required.
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...
Windows 3.1, with the aproppiated drivers and modern SVGA card, had accelerated 2d graphics. Accelerated GUIs don't even need GPU or 3d.
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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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.
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-...