WDDM 2.0 coming up

Jun 1, 2006 15:59 GMT  ·  By

Hardly had the news about Vista's hardware requirements been able to cool off, when the software behemoth already announced new improvements for one of the most important components in its next OS.

Dan Warne at Apc Magazine has quoted Steve Pronovost of Microsoft's DirectX team as saying that, although WDDM 1.0 (Windows Display Driver Model) introduces some task scheduling capabilities for GPUs, the technology is rather rudimentary.

One of the main problems is that, once one program is using the GPU, other programs are shut down until the process completes.

The solution? A new revision of WDDM. The Problem? A new revision of WDDM will require new hardware.

Apc Magazine reports that the new revision, WDDM 2.0, will only run on a new, yet-to-be-released generation of GPUs.

However, it seems that Nvidia and ATI are aware of Microsoft's plans to release new revisions of the Windows Display Driver Model and are already working on new hardware.