San Francisco (CA) - Graphics drivers developed for Vista, Microsoft's next generation operating system, will be far more stable than their Windows XP-based counterparts, and not crash the operating system anymore, an executive of graphics chip developer ATI told Tom's Hardware Guide .
Ben Bar-Haim, vice president of ATI's software division, told us consumers will be able to identify graphics cards supporting Vista by way of a "Vista ready" logo, which will likely appear in multiple flavors indicating different feature levels. The release of Microsoft's new operating system may still be at least one year out, but hardware manufacturers, including ATI, are already gearing up for yet another certification and logo round: "Vista ready" will be the catch-phrase promoting hardware products as a safe investment.
This news coincides with revelations made last week at Microsoft's Professional Developers' Conference in Los Angeles. There, Microsoft engineers revealed that a new version of the company's DirectX rendering library, called DirectX 10, will be engineered to support Vista exclusively, and not XP or older Windows editions. Meanwhile, DirectX 9 will continue to be fully supported, as a lower-grade version of the rendering library that will support both XP and Vista. Graphics cards that carry the Windows logo currently have embedded support for the Direct3D library that is a primary component of DirectX.
Microsoft graphics engineer Rudolph Balaz told attendees at PDC that DirectX 10 will include a fundamentally rewritten graphics infrastructure, making it incompatible with previous versions. As a result, it was implied, there will be two levels of Vista-supporting hardware: one for DX9, the other for DX10, the latter of which may require more on-card graphics memory than the 64 Mb currently being discussed as the "minimum." ATI representatives were present for Valaz' session.
The "Vista ready" logo - or logos - are likely to become hurdles many IGPs will not be able to clear. In a best-case scenario, IGPs such as the Xpress 200 will receive the "basic" certification. How much of Vista's "Aero Glass" eye candy the IGP will be able to deliver, will depend on the actions of the user, according to Bar-Haim. "It really depends on what you do," he said. "For example, the more windows you open, the more the performance of animations will decrease. Even with high-end IGPs you will see degradation when you open too many windows and move them around."
While the "Vista ready" logo promises to be the source of much confusion as far as visual performance is concerned, there is plenty of good news as well. Vista graphics drivers are programmed for a new driver model currently named LDDM (Longhorn Display Driver Model), although the "Longhorn" part is subject to change. According to Bar-Haim, the "user mode-based" drivers depart from Windows XP's "kernel mode-based" model, and are thus unable to crash the operating system: "Microsoft had concerns about the stability of drivers in XP when they noticed an unreasonable high amount of XP crashes due to device drivers. With LDDM, we can run the driver engine for months without crashing," he said.
