Windows 8 will focus on accelerating very graphic

The development team of Windows 8 , led by Steven Sinofsky, ensures that the new operating system Microsoft weblog (final version will be released on 26 October) will be based as much as possible hardware graphics acceleration. Windows 8 draws freely to the new API DirectX 11.1 , which provide an interface to speed up the loading of a wide array of graphic information.

Rob Copeland, a team of engineers Sinofsky says that much work has been done to make it faster and attractive display of text, elements that are most frequently exposed in the interface of the operating system. The libraries DirectWrite allowed to reach the goal by improving the performance on the one hand and the other the quality typography.


Scrolling of long text using a touch screen will appear with Windows 8, a much more “light”: the Font rendering will weigh much less on the processor than it does today. Considerable progress has been made, says Copeland, also for what concerns the display of 2D graphics, they are important because they allow improvements to speed up the loading of those objects that make up the user interface and that are embedded in web pages as well as in online applications.

In Windows 8, the efforts of programmers have focused on support for the HTML5 Canvas and SVG technologies so as to make more fluid applications Metro and the loading of web pages in Internet Explorer 10. To achieve the goal, our engineers have been working on tessellation , the process that converts sets of graphics instructions (information to be displayed on the figures) into a set of triangles and Direct3D commands to be transmitted, reducing the load on the CPU. To improve performance when rendering graphics with irregular edges, it is then combined with the use of hardware features known as ” Target Independent Rasterization “(TIR). It is available on the latest video card, compatible with Windows 8 and DirectX 11.1. Managing images in GIF, JPEG and PNG, very common in all web pages have been optimized through the use of hardware acceleration ( SIMD processor extensions) and algorithms for encoding and decoding faster.