Windows (Longhorn) & VPC video acceleration, a must?
LIke OS X's Jaguar release, apparently Microsofts next major OS will feature a Hardware rendered GUI (see link below).
That said, I think it'll be interesting to see what stance Connectix's Virtual PC will take. It'll be basically impossible to run the next version of Windows without Graphic card acceleration. Will this force VPC to support some sort of Hardware acceleration like they did before with the Voodoo 2? Seems like they're not going to have much of a chioce (Yes!!!!). Thoughts?
<a href="http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/02q2/020503/index.html"; target="_blank">http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/02q2/020503/index.html</a>;
That said, I think it'll be interesting to see what stance Connectix's Virtual PC will take. It'll be basically impossible to run the next version of Windows without Graphic card acceleration. Will this force VPC to support some sort of Hardware acceleration like they did before with the Voodoo 2? Seems like they're not going to have much of a chioce (Yes!!!!). Thoughts?
<a href="http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/02q2/020503/index.html"; target="_blank">http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/02q2/020503/index.html</a>;
Comments
Not questioning its existence in reality, but just interested in the rather antialiased looking text on the chip....
It seems to me that most things can be done in emulation regardless of the implementation in real life. I don't see any reason for Connectix not to make some form of emulation that will take advantage of the nVidia and ATi hardware on Macs.
It may not live up to speed, but again, there is little use speculating on how Connectix will handle the mythological Longhorn.
(incidentally, I tend to treat all "future OSes" as mythological until I see them in shrink-wrap, so don't misunderstand the comment!
<strong>It seems to me that most things can be done in emulation regardless of the implementation in real life. I don't see any reason for Connectix not to make some form of emulation that will take advantage of the nVidia and ATi hardware on Macs.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Sure they may be able to let CPU emulate it but it'd be so slow that it'd make it totally unusable. I have Win 98 & ME in VPC. ME's GUI is dog slow (G4 800 w/512mb). Apparently XP is even worse. Can you imagine how slow it's going to be when M$ impliments an OS X like GUI that requires HW rendering? It'd probably take you 1 minute just to open a folder. No, VPC has only 3 chioces
1. Find a way to massively speed up video emulation without Hardware
2. Find a way to get video cards to be used in VPC
3. Not support the OS.
I don't think 3 is really an option. I don't think 1 is realisticly possible. I think that 2 is thier only choice. It can & was done (to an extent) with the V2. I firmly believe that they simply choose not to (at this point) only becuase of the work involved.