Microsoft Longhorn Reinvents Desktop Graphics

Microsoft's Meltdown conference is all about building games on Windows. Originally started as a compatibility test-fest for hardware makers and software developers, the event has matured into a Windows game developer convention. Highlights from this year's gathering, held July 27th and 28th in Seattle, included presentations about the company's XNA development tools and how to get the most out of Direct3D and DirectSound.

One of the more exciting parts of the conference was a talk entitled "DX Futures," where the Redmond software giant went over some of the architectural details of Longhorn's graphics architecture, which have some big in changes in store for Direct3D.

During the event, David Blythe of the DirectX development team gave a very interesting talk about the upcoming 3D graphics architecture in Longhorn, the next major revision of Windows. Called Windows Graphics Foundation (WGF), this new architecture will usher in some major changes to how 3D graphics operations get handled by Longhorn. These changes extend well beyond Longhorn's Avalon technology, which will render the Windows Desktop using a GPU's 3D graphics processing power rather than the traditional 2D blitter. WGF will instead define the core 3D operations themselves.