VooD
1 HN recommender · recommended in 6 months, 2011–2025
3:15 · 22K views · Aug 3, 2009
A short demo showing slow 2D drawing in the Windows 7 GUI compared with XP. It attributes the slowdown to the display driver model lacking hardware accelerated GDI.
Used as the reference example when people argue Windows UI responsiveness regressed after XP.
6 comments from Hacker News
Here's a more honest and direct introduction than Microsoft itself could wrote: [LINK] Especially follow the YouTube links demonstrating the problem: this video [LINK]
While you might be slightly right, my experience tuning windows machines leads me to believe your missing the mark. I'm going to say the three largest contributions to general desktop lag are: Animations and intentional delays. It can't be said, how much faster a machine feels when something like MenuShowDelay is decreased to 0, or the piles of animations are sped up. Too many layers between the application draw commands and the actual display. All this compositing, vsync, and minimal 2d acceleration creates a low level persistent lag. Disabling aero on a win7 machine does wonders to its responsiveness. But even then pre-vista much of the win32 GDI/drawing API was basically implemented in hardware on the GPU. If you get an old 2d win32 API benchmark, you will notice that modern machines don't tend to fare well in raw API call performance. 30 seconds poking around on youtube, should find you a bunch of comparisons like this this video . Keep in mind that even in 2020 pretty much every application on the machine is still relying on GDI (same as linux apps relying on xlib). Input+processing lag, USB is polling with a fairly slow poll interval rate (think a hundred or so ms). Combined with the fact that the keystrokes/events then end up queued/scheduled through multiple subsystems before eventually finding their way to the correct window, and then having to again reschedule and get the application to retrieve and process it via GetMessage()/etc. Basically, this is more a function of
Actually, its not as accelerated as it was back in the winXP days. Here is a random link about it: this video . Basically, the GPU card vendors could hook any part of the win32 GDI pre windows vista, and they did. Post vista, only a tiny portion of the GDI is accelerated. In theory you can avoid this by writing your application using a more modern API, but the vast majority of native windows applications continue to basically be GDI based due to age, or various GUI toolkits still being GDI based. Worse there are a number of toolkits (or browsers) which implement their own drawing routines rather than calling the system supplied ones. The final composited results with aero are of course accelerated, but that only really tends to add additional latency. Switching to one of the basic themes makes win7 noticeably more responsive, but also tends to tear a lot. I've got an incredibly high end desktop machine, carefully tweaked/optimized and I can frequently see it the ~1/10 of a second lags while windows update after being maximized/etc. Compared to the 10 year old pretty high end XP machine (with upgraded SSD/etc, and also carefully tuned) it doesn't seem to be faster on basic desktop type operations. Fire up a recent game, or doing builds its massively faster but running word/firefox/whatever the old machine "feels" faster. (tuned, as in I have a dozen or so, tweaks I've been collecting/researching for the past decade+, on ways to make the machine feel more responsive, it all starte
I tried it on a new computer (Haswell desktop with SSD). But Windows 8.1 is still slower than XP. Even though I disabled all animations I can feel some lag between clicks and response. Probably it's because of this: this video ("Windows 7 GUI slowness") I'm going back to XP, but I needed to buy a dedicated graphics card because Intel HD doesn't have drivers for XP. And there's also 3GB RAM limit.
I will use Windows XP for another 5 years - until new software and hardware will stop working on XP. Windows 7 GUI is 5 times slower than XP and has bugs: this video (Windows 7 GUI slowness) [LINK] (Windows 7 GUI slowness: file explorer) Windows 7 uses 5 times as much resources: XP: 233MHz, 64MB RAM, 1.5 GB. 7: 1GHz, 1GB RAM, 16 GB.