20 reasons why Vista will be your next OS

28.06.2006

For engineering-level information about Vista power management, please see this Microsoft Web page.

7. Applied graphics

Avalon's amazing graphics

The cost in hardware support may be more taxing than most companies and end users are fully prepared for, but there's nothing wrong with the result. Even in Beta 2, it seems to me that Microsoft has surpassed Apple's Macintosh OS X in the area of rapidly rendered, well-formed, 3D graphics. For the first time ever, Windows will offer graphics mastery. That will clearly be true for games, and Wintel PCs have long been the premier gaming platform. But it will also be true for the Windows interface and any applications that are written to take advantage of the new graphics subsystem, whose codename was Avalon. (Microsoft now calls it Windows Presentation Foundation. The company's codenames so much better than its marketing names. What's up with that?)

Unless you've tried Vista Beta 2 (or newer), I don't think you're qualified to dispute my next statement. I've seen numerous forum posts and articles that summed up Avalon as so much eye candy. It's true, that's what it supports. But it's how you use the 3D graphical horsepower to make the interface easier to interact with that can make a huge difference to the user experience. Avalon, and its highest level "Aero" interface, introduces a bevy of new visual tools that include transparency, translucency, shadows, reflections, blurring, vector-based rendering and crisp icon scaling, and a new video driver subsystem. Combined, these new graphical capabilities deliver several important advantages: