14 DAY TRIAL // The upcoming operating system designed by Microsoft, dubbed Windows 7, promises a lot in terms of performance when compared to the currently available products of the company, and this is the software developer's position as well. Thus, the Redmond giant partnered with hardware manufacturers so as to provide customers with the best driver support for the OS, meant to leverage user's experience.
The only problem here seems to be connected to the use on Hybrid SLI and Hybrid CrossFire under Windows 7. According to several reports on the web, Microsoft has issued a warning in its Guidelines for Graphics in Windows 7 document, stating that the operating system “does not offer native support for hybrid graphics systems”. According to the software developer, hybrid graphics systems “can be unstable and provide a poor user experience” which determines it to “strongly discourage system manufacturers from shipping such systems”.
Both NVIDIA and ATI, the graphics unit of Advanced Micro Devices, designed the Hybrid technologies as low-end multi-graphics systems which enable users to complement an integrated graphics chip with a low-end discrete graphics card so as to leverage the video performance of the system. Since the two companies have made great efforts to create the technology, Microsoft was expected to make Windows 7 compatible with it as well.
The reports say that, besides categorizing it as unstable, Microsoft also stated that Hybrid configurations “require a reboot to switch between GPUs”. Microsoft's Guidelines for Graphics in Windows 7 page is unavailable at the time of writing this article, but we hope to take a look at it pretty soon.
On other news, we learn that NVIDIA is one manufacturer Microsoft worked closely with to offer the best driver support for Windows 7 on its graphics cards. “The importance of the GPU increases as visual computing applications become more popular, so it is essential that we deliver a quality experience,” said Dwight Diercks, vice president of software engineering at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA has been working closely with Microsoft to ensure that pre-beta users of Windows 7 get full support and an unsurpassed graphics experience on NVIDIA-based graphics cards.”
At the WinHEC, Los Angeles, the two companies will demonstrate the visual enhancements available in Windows 7 as result of their collaboration. Among the new features NVIDIA’s drivers will enable in the new OS, we can find WDDM 1.1, Direct3D 11, GDI acceleration, Direct2D, DirectWrite, DXVA HD, not to mention the well known features already present in Microsoft's Windows Vista.