Windows 7 is going to be the first Windows OS to treat the GPU more as an equal to the CPU, according to Nvidia product manager Chris Daniel. He also says that with Windows 7, Microsoft is “really opening up the immense parallel computing horsepower of the GPU natively right in the operating system.”
This is obviously great news for graphics ungry users like engineers and digital artists. We already know that this will be great for gamers.
Windows 7 introduces a new API called DirectX Compute, which enables the system to fully use the parallel processing in modern graphics cards from Nvidia, ATI, and others.
In ye olden days of PC lore, when computer processors didn’t include the math coprocessor for cost purposes, anything requiring floating point math calculation took FOREVER to complete. I know this because I had an old Packard Bell 486SX laptop with the old CPU which did not have the coprocessor built in. A 486DX would have had the floating point instructions built into the main CPU.
I had a 3D architectural program that would let you build houses and rooms in 2D, then it would render them in 3D for a walkthrough. The 3D rendering required floating point math, and it took a long time to render on the non floating point CPU. This old laptop did, however, have a spot for a math coprocessor. I purchased and installed it, and the 3D rendering phase of that program took off. Not long after that, math coprocessing instructions were built into the main CPU as a standard feature. This was before the days of these 3D graphics cards with their unreal floating point performance. These cards’ instructions are utilized by many games’ routines which are specifically built for accessing these features. In DOS and some older Windows versions like Windows 95, the games (like DOOM) would basically create their own operating environment which the OS would shell out to, in order to have access to 32 bit and graphics functions. Later on, Microsoft introduced the DirectX API for direct access to the graphics features via the OS itself. Now it seems that they are taking it one step further. I am not totally clear on how the games, which are essentially Windows apps, could access the graphics features via regular DirectX, but regular apps require this new API? I probably am missing a step somewhere in there. I’m sure that there are new GPU features that they allow access to, or improve the access. Maybe this new API merely makes it easier to access for regular (non games) applications programmers. I really do not know at this time. I have not studied the API.
Chris Daniel further claims that Directx Compute will “enable use of advanced technologies like SLI-based, multi-GPU gaming, 3D Vision, and PhysX real-time physics.” So, this will bring parallel computing to the masses.
Well, that’s great news for graphics hungry Windows users who have top shelf graphics hardware. I guess that that $6000 Alienware gaming laptop is again calling my name.
