Microsoft: Pre-Mature WDDM 1.1 Drivers Restricting Win 7
If you’ve missed, the top buzz around Windows 7’s leaked RC (build 7100) is on the XP Mode & gaming performance. ZDNet did an article where the charts clearly show that there’s hardly any difference if any between Win 7 RC & Vista SP1. The benchmarking was done on various GPUs & games. One of the graphs from the test:
The difference is negligible. Same was for the other games. However, some hours back, Microsoft on the Engineering 7 (E7) blog published an article dealing with Windows 7’s graphical performance & towards the end mentioned as to why we see no difference:
In comparing Windows 7, we would encourage the comparison using Windows Vista SP1 and keep in mind the difference you might see in WDDM 1.0 v. 1.1 and that the 1.1 drivers are still under development.
In effect they are trying to say that you should wait till WDDM 1.1 matures? :|
What is WDDM?
WDDM is just a new display driver architecture supported in Windows Vista and later systems. Device manufacturers develop the hardware drivers within this architecture. However, the performance of these drivers depend on the design of the driver developments, but not WDDM. Therefore, the WDDM 1.0 driver works better than the WDDM 1.1 one.
UPDATE: Title corrected.
Not entirely true. WDDM 1.1 is essentially a superset of WDDM 1.0 with new APIs for the operating system to do more, but most of those changes are unrelated to gaming. On the other hand, DX11 will bring new features and performance improvements to games, but that will be available to both WDDM 1.0 and 1.1 (and hardware dependent).
Thanks for article. Everytime like to read you.
WDDM 1.1 drivers address an AERO related issue:
When using the AERO interface in Vista, old applications using the GDI APIs (instead of eg. WPF) had to render window contents using the CPU. In order for this to work a COPY of the window contents needs to exist in normal RAM (rather than the VIDEO RAM of the GPU).
In WDDM 1.1 the GDI windows are rendered directly in the Video RAM using the GPU.
Using WDDM 1.0 drivers in 7 you miss the opportunity to render GDI windows with the GPU, thus losing memory (and a tiny amound of CPU cycles).
Hi,
I am trying to install WDM 1.1 on Windows 7. But I could not get any installer which will install it.
Please give me some link which has downloadable WDDM 1.1.
wddm 1.1 comes on Windows 7 by default. Not sure but I guess Windows 7 Starter won’t have it.
how do l download WDM