Hi everyone,

If by bad code you mean bugs then i mean not only does Microsoft have them but almost all products do. Its something that's understandable. What i don't like is the spyware Microsoft bundles with its softwares to send to its headquaters. If the user know about i then its okay but don't try to hide them. I think alot of you guys remember the windows media fiasco.

I think the worst thing people are most angry about Vista is that they are planning to drop support for opengl. That made alot of game developers and gamers furious but lets see what happens in the future

Richard West

Where did Microsoft EVER say it was droping OpenGL support?

You can host an Hwnd inside an Avalon application. However, having Avalon render on top of OpenGL-based content which is accelerated through an ICD is likely to cause flicker and it is going to be hard to have things to register properly temporally, given the two independent rendering pipelines

Existing applications will continue to run without requiring modification. In order to use new Avalon features, developers or designers will need to write to the Avalon classes.

No: Avalon is built on top of DirectX and DirectX still available for gaming and other scenarios that require direct access to graphics hardware.

How well do Direct3D rendering and Avalon rendering mix?

As with mixing OpenGL rendering and Avalon rendering (above), the Hwnd hosting solution works - just like hosting GDI/GDI+/Windows Forms content. Compositing Avalon on top will work better on Longhorn, because of changes that we are making to the underlying operating system. We can't take those changes down-level (i.e., to previous operating systems) as they are extensive - new driver model, changes to GDI, etc.

As you've read before, Longhorn will use its own API to handle 2d and 3d graphics. Microsoft knows that this will cause a lot of compatibility problems and thats why they are talking to the videocard manufacturers. The new videocards ofcourse need to support the new graphics system and the manufacturers have to adjust their videocards' architecture so it will take full advantage of Longhorn. Because of this the support for OpenGL won't be as good anymore, because all the new videocards will be specialized in WGF graphics. Because of the new WGF technology, game engines need to be adapted to Longhorn as well. This means, that engines that will be used in the near future, like the Doom 3, Source and Unreal 3 Engine, will have to be fully compatible with WGF and the new videocard architecture. The next serie nVidia and ATI cards WON'T support the new technologies.

With Longhorn Microsoft wants to eliminate the long installation procedures that PC games have. Installing and playing a game should be as easy as with a console. They too are developing a special driver manager, so you won't have any problems with different drivers. This means no problems with flickering textures, stuttering and crashing anymore, because the drivers will be fully controled by the graphics interface and because of this system nVidia and ATI can develop and test their drivers for problems within a few seconds. Updating drivers and BIOS'es will get a lot easier because Windows Update will get a special feature that automatically checks if your hardware is up to date and automatically updates your drivers, BIOS'es, the Longhorn graphics interface and even updates for the most important feature of Longhorn, WGF 2.0.