Per application volume control is promising and the improved audio stack is a beauty.
Am I the only one who thinks this sounds really annoying?
Anyway, I don't trust anything that Microsoft says. Time and time again, they talk big and release crap. So we'll see.
Appearantly. I think it's a useful feature that the OS has needed, other than them switching to 32Bit floating point operations in
the audio stack.
I don't know how you're doubting features backed by screenshots and mentioned in multiple reviews, not like they just coded it in their to lie to the user..I think you're just not looking at it from both sides, everyone else is.
His article while not being as technical as I hoped, got his point across. He stated features everyone wouldn't notice right away the "under the hood" features.
"The DX10 graphics API will usher in unified vertex and pixel shaders, and introduce the concept of "geometry shaders" that can act on not just single vertices, but whole triangles and their adjacent vertices. Developers will be able to stream out data from the GPU and reuse it without needing the CPU to do a single thing, so a lot of the CPU load seen in current graphics drivers and games should be reduced. DX10 should allow for more flexible and granular graphics memory access, and in general allow GPUs to be far more flexible and powerful than before."
This is currently my favorite feature. It is insane and it's what they currently do with their UI (as I've explained before) which means less CPU load for more power. Everything is in 3D world, so things scale easily unlike in XP where if you changed a reso (Like I did a few days ago) everything goes whacky. I havn't tested the resolution feature yet but I have tested that you CAN scale iconsto rediculous sizes. Of course the UI isn't DX10 (Too bad) but that was so more people support it.
"There's some real meat to the new compositing and drawing engine; it's not all for visual fluff. For starters, you don't have to worry about that whole "moving a busy window blanks out part of the screen" thing."
That is part of Avalon (WPF) iirc, it's how the system displays hung Windows. They will no longer turn "All white" with the look that you can erase them when you move over, they simply freeze their rendering to that current frame. It seems to work quite well. I think a lot of work has been put into this not only making it work but making it an easy to use developer solution, most people only see the UI and overlook this.
I havn't tested the backup app yet but in most reviews it's been getting 5 stars so
.
@Ergot: The problem with doing it earlier was the lack of hardware. Let's say when XP came out, hardware was JUST getting good. IT was just getting fast enough for us to move things to usermode and suffer no performance loss. If we would have done this in Windows98 or even WindowsXP when it first came out, it would have decreased performance while increasing stability. Same reason Video stuff was always in Kernel mode.
