About minwin : ah, but youre (at least theoretically) wrong. Now with Vista, it makes it a breeze. Vista decoupled the graphic subsystem from the kernel, in fact making it a X-like subsystem, where you have a DRI-likeish driver in kernel space, and a usermode driver for everything else, and a userland server for the windowing system. When UAC kicks in and aero glass is shutting down, you have a black screen - thats the windowing system shutting down and restarting. If memory serves right, Microsoft advertised that in Longhorn Server one could disable the GUI completely letting the server run the command line only. This kind of modularity is what exactly what the doctor ordered, and could potentially make Windows 7 feel fast - but only potentially.
Why? Because like DirectX 10, Aero Glass and DWM are clearly broken somewhere. Lecture time:
The sotyr goes that until Vista, the graphics that you saw on-screen (when not playing a game obiously) would be rendered almost entirely on the processor. That is, applications "tell" the kernel what they want on their windows, the kernel draws those, composes all of them in main RAM, then sends the result to the video card do display, rince repeat 60 times a second. The exceptions are D3D/OpenGL apps, Overlay video (the pink box). Also, MS used a hack for making some windows transparent - but again, this was not accelerated in the sense that DirectX was doing it.
This is of course bad, because we have $300 graphics cards that sit there doing nothing 95% of the time, generating heat and wasting power. Apple (again) with the release of Jaguar pioneered a GPU-accelerated desktop. The processor would render the content of the window, but that image would be immiediately sent to the Graphics RAM, and from there on the GPU would compose all of those windows into the desktop - this is how stuff like Expose and the Genie Effect are possible. This is also what supposedly Aero Basic does.
The next logical step would be for the GPU to render ALL of the stuff - the window contents, font rasterization et al. Theres a bit of problem with this though - this can potentially take up a lot of VRAM. In fact, you can go overboard, so you need to virtualize your VRAM and make it seem infinite - this is what Linux people are NOT doing, and so people with nVidia drivers are getting black windows. Mac OS X has had this from 10.4 (Quartz Extreme 2D) but not enabled, because it was potentially dangerous and would slow down the graphics subsystem instead of speeding it up (mainly flash - it has a _lot_ of quirks to make stuff fast on a general processor that just dont translate to GPU instructions). Its also in Leopard (now its called QuartzGL) but this time around each app must specifically ask for it to be enabled. This is also what Aero Glass does.
The only problem is Mac OS X for the latter to work requires any Pixel Shader 2.0 card with 64MB VRam. This means that my GMA950 qualifies for this easily (while the GMA950 is not DX9 compliant, it does have Pixel Shader 2.0. The problem with it is the lack of T&L - it delegates T&L operations and Vertex Shader operations to the CPU). Now, Microsofts Aero Glass subsystem needs at least a Nvidia 6600 class card with 128MB Vram for the same stuff. Oh wait - did i say the same? Nooo. Moving a window in Vista with Aero Glass turned on eats away 20% CPU on my desktop PC with a 6600GT (256MB Vram). On my Macbook it eats up about 14% on doing the same (but the Macbook has a Core2Duo 2Ghz, while the desktop one has a Celeron 3.0 Nocona).
So heres my question - why is the technology that is supposed to take away the burden of drawing the GUI from the processor actually making the CPU do _MORE_ work?
End of Lecture
To the person with the PS3 : I used to play "popular" games on my PC. However, coming from an 8bit Atari and 16bit Amiga background, after a couple of years i found the popular games scene to be lacking to say the least, and beeing a pile of dogshit for mindless drones to say thruthfully. I gave up entirely after Doom 3 and Quake 4 failed to inject any positive reaction towards me, not to mentioned i saw what used to be a great game - Need for Speed 2, turn into a MTV-gangsta_rap bare slutfest for hip-hop black wannabees. I have to thank Playstation 2 for this mostly, and Halo. Now there are exceptions for this rule - Portal is great, i played it on my brothers PC, but it just proves the point that originality has been lost somewhere along the way and nowadays kids just want to play Dog Shooter 5 for the Playstation 13, or the Bling-Car racing game. I long for the days when games had a soul like Omikron : The Nomad Soul, The Outcast, Day of the tentacle, Earthworm Jim, Sensible Soccer, Turrican. From todays title it seems that only Double Fine tries to keep their products have a bit of that somethin (Psychonauts ftw!)
But then again looking at todays youth culture (sex) visuals matter more that the sense of what theyre experiencing - just looking at the newest videoclip of Justin Timberlake, or .. So its no surprise that you have a PS3 - guess having HDR visuals shot in you face/seeing realistic guts in God of War is enough to make it hard for you. Ill take my childish Mario/Zelda/Metroid titles then, thank you very much
P.S. On a different note - I enjoyed Silent Hill on PS1, and all of the sequels on the PS2 very much. However, it seems that SH5 is in the hands of a bunch of jyofull idiots so i think ill pass. Also, if this was /. someone should mark your port -1 Flamebait.
