Not Just For Games
You won't need to be a gamer, or even use DX10, to get some of the new glitter and glitz. For example, Vista's Aero display gets its hardware acceleration from having been built using the new Windows Presentation Foundation. The platform, which is built into Vista and is also included in the new .Net 3.0 framework for XP, opens up DirectX to other programs for acceleration and other processing. Times Reader, a downloadable program that displays an electronic look-alike of The New York Times newspaper, was built with WPF (you can grab the Reader beta).
Aero--which requires only a DX9-capable GPU--also makes use of the Windows Display Driver Model in Vista to improve on the way programs can access graphics resources. Previously, only one program at a time could access graphics resources using DirectX: "An application could monopolize the processing and starve other graphics applications," says Pablo Fernicola, group program manager for Windows Presentation Foundation.
With the new model, multiple applications will be able to access DirectX resources (both 10 and 9, which remains in Vista) simultaneously. So program designers should have more leeway to add visual effects without fear of bogging down users' computers.
As Vista and improved video cards become more prevalent, the new graphics features could give rise to more eye-pleasers in games and productivity apps alike.
"In theory," says Andrew Dodd, software product manager for ATI, "you could have Office or Word documents with 3D acceleration."
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