High-end computers are likely to be the must for advanced multimedia work, advanced computer gaming and of course, computers graphics work. You can still use those three purposes on mid-end computers but the performance will not be as good as the one in high-end computers. In the past from 80s to 90s, there were Windows Accelerators powered graphics cards which allowed the windows from the desktop GUI to be moved around the screen faster. As technology involves, so do the newer graphics cards and their new features as well as the newer methods from the developers. So far for Windows 8, there is still no sign of Windows Media Player 13 or DirectX 12 and yet, the recent graphic cards are already powered by DirectX 10 or 11 with DirectX 11 powered graphics cards being the latest opportunities for Windows Vista and 7 gaming users.
With the new Hardware Acceleration features for Windows 8, it seems that the Metro stuffs are starting to get smoother but unfortunately for Office 15 Splash Screen, it isn't quite smooth as we realized. Also, another goal from the developers of the operating system is that they want to provide a hardware-accelerated platform for all Metro style apps regardless of which type of app to ensure that things are performing smoothly as well as to add new capabilities to the existing DirectX to enable stunning visual experiences but with interface like Metro interface, I am not sure about the graphical features because in Office 15, certain graphical features are apparently different or perhaps broken. Even with the goals they have set to ensure smooth graphical performance, the great performance and graphics platform's capabilities surely depend on your computer's video card.
So far, NVIDIA already has the video card drivers for Windows 8 but since this is the power of prototyping, things may not be accurate.
But to a surprise without our knowledge through corroboration, even the latest Windows Live Essentials programs make use of DirectX perhaps for animations such as Mail, Mesh, Messenger, etc.
For text performance improvement in Windows 8, it goes a long way towards creating the better experience so web pages, email programs, instant messaging and other reading apps are able to benefit from high quality and high-performance text display. The Metro style design language ever since two years ago is used in the latest Windows Live Essentials, Windows Phone 7 and 8, the new Xbox 360 Dashboard and the on-going Microsoft official website.
For geometry rendering performance in Windows 8, is the core graphics technology used for tablets, charts, graphs, diagrams and user interface elements. The improvements deliver high-performance implementations of HTML5 Canvas and SVG technologies for use in Metro style apps and webpages viewed in Metro web browser apps. In IE10 Metro edition, it is already smooth enough in watching YouTube videos in HTML5 mode but even then, things are still not accurate in terms of performance. A new graphics hardware feature called, Target Independent Rasterization is used to improve the graphics performance when rendering irregular geometry. It enables Direct2D to spend few CPU cycles on tessellation so that it can give drawing instructions to the GPU more quickly and efficiently without sacrificing visual quality. It is available in the video cards that support Windows 8 and DirectX 11.1. Furthermore, Microsoft even collaborated with the developing partners of the video cards to design TIR. Dramatic improvements were made possible thanks to this collaboration. DirectX 11.1 video cards are already available today that you may want to buy a new computer with those video cards so that you can get the newest technology experience as long as you're using Windows 8 but more work still needs to be done so that TIR-capable products will be broadly available.
For image rendering through PNG and JPEG, the SIMD usage is expanded for faster image decoding on all CPU architectures. JPEG's improvement also has faster Huffman while PNG's improvement has faster image encoding and decoding by optimizing zlib implemented by Microsoft. The results are that the rendering time is much lesser in Windows 8.
Direct2D Effects form the new set of APIs that enable high-quality hardware-accelerated effects to be applied to any image. They provide optimal-quality renderings of image effects to suit the needs of wide variety of apps. They are also hardware-accelerated and work on a wide variety of graphics hardware. They provide many built-in effects and support large image sizes and up to 32 bits per channel. Lastly, custom effects can be combined with built-in effects or other custom effects. The SVG filter effects and CSS 3D transforms are implemented using Direct2D Effects features.
Overall, the rendering is much faster in Windows 8 and the new graphics features improve the new graphics capabilities. Hopefully, there will be newer video cards that support Windows 8 but my point is that there should be DirectX 12 because DirectX 11.1 is minor to us.
