MaximumPC 2005 10

S

ometimes you just have to start

over and do it the right way. That’s

what Apple did with OS X, and

it’s paid off in huge performance and

reliability dividends. Although there aren’t

any insurmountable fl aws in Windows

XP, there’s tons of legacy code designed

to support applications that date back

to a time before the Internet. With Vista,

Microsoft is letting go of much of the

legacy past, and we salute that.

LONGHORN DISPLAY

DRIVER MODEL

The biggest news in Vista is its departure

from the GDI—the Graphical Device

Interface—which has drawn everything on

your Windows desktop since Windows 3.0.

Replacing it is the Longhorn Display Driver

Model (LDDM), which will almost certainly

receive a new name before launch.

The LDDM is necessary to the

transition from a 2D bitmap-based desktop

renderer to Vista’s vector-based 3D-

rendered desktop—

named Aero.

Moving to a vector-

based desktop

is a good thing.

Because vector-

based images

describe the shape

of onscreen objects

using math instead

of simply placing

pixels, everything

Vista displays

will be infi nitely

resizable. That’s

great for resizing

windows, but it’s

even more helpful

when you pair it

with displays that

sport greater than normal DPI. Instead of

using an interpolation method to describe

the extra pixels, Vista can simply calculate

the extra pixels that should be present. The

resulting image will be crisper and cleaner.

So what about legacy content that

requires GDI? It’s easy: Vista emulates the

GDI, draws the contents of the legacy app’s

window off-screen, then writes that render

to a texture and applies it to the visible

window. Microsoft claims there’s a slight,

but unnoticeable performance hit. Our

testing with legacy GDI apps backs that up.

DIRECTX 10

Rumors of Direct X’s demise have been

greatly exaggerated. Along with the

introduction of the LDDM, Vista will also

feature DirectX 10, a new, updated version

of Direct3D that doesn’t include a lot of the

legacy cruft.

Let’s talk about the removed or

deprecated APIs fi rst. DirectInput,

DirectPlay, and DirectMusic won’t appear

in Vista. DirectInput has been supplanted

by a new API designed for the Universal

 MA XIMUMPC OCTOBER 2005

New Technology

Microsoft added tons of new functionality to the underpinnings of the OS in order to keep Vista running at full speed

despite increased hardware requirements

Vista’s new user interface, Aero, uses the LDDM to draw

transparent borders around every window in real time.

Despite a rumored “both versions in the

box” launch strategy, the current word

on the street is that the 64-bit version of

Windows Vista will be packaged separately

from the 32-bit edition.

By the end of 2006, when we expect

Vista to ship, every shipping CPU should

support the AMD64 extensions, and be

capable of running the 64-bit version

of the OS. But because Microsoft plans

to ship the two versions separately, we

expect that a relatively small number

of people will actually take advantage

of the 64-bit edition. Without lots of

folks using 64-bit Vista, it’s unlikely that

smaller hardware manufacturers will ship

64-bit Vista drivers, leaving 64-bit users

outta luck when it comes to connecting

printers, RAID cards, and other devices.

That’s just no good.

What about 64-Bit Vista?

We’re not sure exactly what the Vista team had to do to pull this off, but the Time

Remaining bar is actually accurate in Beta 1. We timed it!

Windows

VISTA
Comes Together