The best they could do with the GFX business is a public execution. We've been hearing about terrible Intel GFX for 15 years and how they are just on the cusp of making one that is bad (not terrible). Most people who've been following hardware think Intel and GFX is just an oxymoron. Wall Street might see some value in it, but the rest of us, no.
What does an OS need a GPU for?
My current laptop only has integrated Intel GPU. I'm not missing Nvidia, with its proprietary drivers, high power consumption, and corresponding extra heat and shorter battery life...
An 8K 32bpp framebuffer is ... omg 126MB for a single copy. I was going to argue that a software rasterizer running on vcache would be doable, but not for 8k.
For 4k, with 32MB per display buffer, it could be possible but heavy compositing will require going out to main memory. 1440p would be even better at only 15MB per display buffer.
For 1440p at 144Hz and 2TB/s (vcache max), best case is an overdraw of 984 frames/frame
It actually separates the OS from the GPU. Before WDDM your GFX device driver was the only software that could use GFX acceleration. After WDDM the GPU is another "processor" in your computer that can read and write to RAM and the application can use the GPU in user space any way it wants, and then the compositor can to the same (in user space) and in the end all the OS is managing communication with the GPU.
For that approach to work you need to have enough fill rate that you can redraw the screen several times per frame. Microsoft wanted to have enough they could afford some visual bling, but Intel didn't give to them.
Which is far more powerful than the ones that caused problems almost two decades ago.
As people noted, most of your GUI is being rendered by it. Every video you watch is accelerated by it, and if it has some compute support, some applications are using it for faster math at the background (mostly image editors, but who knows).
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2008-03-27-nvidia-drivers-responsib...
It wasn't fully WDDM compatible for a quite minor (overall) part, but the performance were awful anyway and lack of running in the full WDDM mode (ie Aero) also didn't help too, partly because running in Aero was faster.
not sure about it. i had friends with discrete GPUs at the time and they told me that vista was essentially a gpu-stress program rather than an OS.
at the same time, compiz/beryl on linux worked beautifully on intel integrated gpus, and were doing way cooler things than vista was doing at the time (cube desktops? windows bursting into flames when closed?).
I'm a bit sad that compiz/beryl is not as popular anymore (with all the crazy things it could do).
