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Windows Display Driver Model

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Windows Display Driver Model ( WDDM , initially LDDM as Longhorn Display Driver Model and then WVDDM in times of Windows Vista) is the graphic driver architecture for video card drivers running Microsoft Windows versions beginning with Windows Vista .

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105-494: It is a replacement for the previous Windows 2000 and Windows XP display driver model XDDM/XPDM and is aimed at enabling better performance graphics and new graphics functionality and stability. Display drivers in Windows Vista and Windows 7 can choose to either adhere to WDDM or to XDDM. With the removal of XDDM from Windows 8 , however, WDDM became the only option. WDDM provides the functionality required to render

210-497: A Safe removal applet for removable storage devices. Windows 2000 SP4 added native USB 2.0 support, Wireless Zero Configuration support and SSE3 support. Windows 2000 is also the first Windows version to support hibernation at the operating system level (OS-controlled ACPI S4 sleep state) unlike Windows 98 which required special drivers from the hardware manufacturer or driver developer. A new capability designed to protect critical system files called Windows File Protection

315-452: A Windows Interface Source Environment partner. Microsoft issued the following statement: "Microsoft source code is both copyrighted and protected as a trade secret. As such, it is illegal to post it, make it available to others, download it or use it." Despite the warnings, the archive containing the leaked code spread widely on the file-sharing networks. On February 16, 2004, an exploit "allegedly discovered by an individual studying

420-406: A blue screen error as it would in previous driver models. WDDM also allows the graphics hardware to be reset and users to update drivers without requiring a reboot. The new driver model requires the graphics hardware to have Shader Model 2.0 support at least, since the fixed function pipeline is now translated to 2.0 shaders . However, according to Microsoft as of 2009, only about 1–2 percent of

525-462: A shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light , darkness , and color during the rendering of a 3D scene —a process known as shading . Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of specialized functions in computer graphics special effects and video post-processing , as well as general-purpose computing on graphics processing units . Traditional shaders calculate rendering effects on graphics hardware with

630-484: A 10-bit high dynamic range, wide gamut format defined by ITU-T Rec. 2100 / Rec.2020 - and variable refresh rates. Windows 10 Creators Update (version 1703) includes WDDM 2.2, which is tailored for virtual , augmented and mixed reality with stereoscopic rendering for the Windows Mixed Reality platform, and DXGI 1.6. Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (version 1709) includes WDDM 2.3. The following

735-451: A WDDM driver, the screen resolution will most likely be unaffected; all hardware faults cause the driver to be reset and the user will be notified by a popup; this unifies the behavior across vendors. Previous drivers were fully implemented in kernel mode, whereas WDDM is implemented partly in user mode. If the user mode area fails with an unrecoverable error, it will, at the most, cause the application to quit unexpectedly instead of producing

840-471: A better approximation of a curve. As of OpenGL 4.0 and Direct3D 11, a new shader class called a tessellation shader has been added. It adds two new shader stages to the traditional model: tessellation control shaders (also known as hull shaders) and tessellation evaluation shaders (also known as Domain Shaders), which together allow for simpler meshes to be subdivided into finer meshes at run-time according to

945-399: A cache stored in a separate "DLLCACHE" directory, or from the original install media. Microsoft recognized that a serious error (a Blue Screen of Death or stop error) could cause problems for servers that needed to be constantly running and so provided a system setting that would allow the server to automatically reboot when a stop error occurred. Also included is an option to dump any of

1050-426: A color value; more complex shaders with multiple inputs/outputs are also possible. Pixel shaders range from simply always outputting the same color, to applying a lighting value, to doing bump mapping , shadows , specular highlights , translucency and other phenomena. They can alter the depth of the fragment (for Z-buffering ), or output more than one color if multiple render targets are active. In 3D graphics,

1155-586: A different market, they share a core set of features, including many system utilities such as the Microsoft Management Console and standard system administration applications. Microsoft marketed Windows 2000 as the most secure Windows version ever at the time; however, it became the target of a number of high-profile virus attacks such as Code Red and Nimda . For ten years after its release, it continued to receive patches for security vulnerabilities nearly every month until reaching

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1260-497: A file to be transparently referred from one file or directory location to another. Windows 2000 also introduces a Distributed Link Tracking service to ensure file shortcuts remain working even if the target is moved or renamed. The target object's unique identifier is stored in the shortcut file on NTFS 3.0 and Windows can use the Distributed Link Tracking service for tracking the targets of shortcuts, so that

1365-470: A file with a bulk symmetric key (also known as the File Encryption Key, or FEK), which is used because it takes less time to encrypt and decrypt large amounts of data than if an asymmetric key cipher were used. The symmetric key used to encrypt the file is then encrypted with a public key associated with the user who encrypted the file, and this encrypted data is stored in the header of

1470-403: A final rendered image can be altered using algorithms defined in a shader, and can be modified by external variables or textures introduced by the computer program calling the shader. Shaders are used widely in cinema post-processing , computer-generated imagery , and video games to produce a range of effects. Beyond simple lighting models, more complex uses of shaders include: altering

1575-565: A geometry shader if present, or the rasterizer . Vertex shaders can enable powerful control over the details of position, movement, lighting, and color in any scene involving 3D models . Geometry shaders were introduced in Direct3D 10 and OpenGL 3.2; formerly available in OpenGL 2.0+ with the use of extensions. This type of shader can generate new graphics primitives , such as points, lines, and triangles, from those primitives that were sent to

1680-471: A geometry shader include point sprite generation, geometry tessellation , shadow volume extrusion, and single pass rendering to a cube map . A typical real-world example of the benefits of geometry shaders would be automatic mesh complexity modification. A series of line strips representing control points for a curve are passed to the geometry shader and depending on the complexity required the shader can automatically generate extra lines each of which provides

1785-612: A high degree of flexibility. Most shaders are coded for (and run on) a graphics processing unit (GPU), though this is not a strict requirement. Shading languages are used to program the GPU's rendering pipeline , which has mostly superseded the fixed-function pipeline of the past that only allowed for common geometry transforming and pixel-shading functions; with shaders, customized effects can be used. The position and color ( hue , saturation , brightness , and contrast ) of all pixels , vertices , and/or textures used to construct

1890-476: A major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It is the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0 , and was released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999, officially released to retail on February 17, 2000 for all versions, and on September 26, 2000 for Windows 2000 Datacenter Server. It was Microsoft's primary business-oriented operating system until

1995-418: A mathematical function. The function can be related to a variety of variables, most notably the distance from the viewing camera to allow active level-of-detail scaling. This allows objects close to the camera to have fine detail, while further away ones can have more coarse meshes, yet seem comparable in quality. It also can drastically reduce required mesh bandwidth by allowing meshes to be refined once inside

2100-414: A mesh created by another application into the scene it is rendering. Sharing textures between processes before WDDM was difficult, as it would have required copying the data from video memory to system memory and then back to video memory for the new device. If a WDDM driver hangs or encounters a fault, the graphics stack will restart the driver. A graphics hardware fault will be intercepted and if necessary

2205-733: A new 'mini' boot screen, and removed the 'dark space' theme in the logo. The Windows NT 5.0 betas had very long startup and shutdown sounds, though these were changed in the early Windows 2000 beta, but during Beta 3, a new piano -made startup and shutdown sounds were made, composed by Steven Ray Allen. It was featured in the final version as well as in Windows Me . The new login prompt from the final version made its first appearance in Beta 3 build 1946 (the first build of Beta 3). The new, updated icons (for My Computer , Recycle Bin etc.) first appeared in Beta 3 build 1964. The Windows 2000 boot screen in

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2310-479: A per-vertex basis. Newer geometry shaders can generate new vertices from within the shader. Tessellation shaders are the newest 3D shaders; they act on batches of vertices all at once to add detail—such as subdividing a model into smaller groups of triangles or other primitives at runtime, to improve things like curves and bumps , or change other attributes. Vertex shaders are the most established and common kind of 3D shader and are run once for each vertex given to

2415-421: A performance diagnostic console, which displays graphs of system performance and configures data logs and alerts. It also contains a service configuration console, which allows users to view all installed services and to stop and start them, as well as configure what those services should do when the computer starts. CHKDSK has significant performance improvements. Windows 2000 comes with two utilities to edit

2520-647: A pixel shader alone cannot produce some kinds of complex effects because it operates only on a single fragment, without knowledge of a scene's geometry (i.e. vertex data). However, pixel shaders do have knowledge of the screen coordinate being drawn, and can sample the screen and nearby pixels if the contents of the entire screen are passed as a texture to the shader. This technique can enable a wide variety of two-dimensional postprocessing effects such as blur , or edge detection /enhancement for cartoon/cel shaders . Pixel shaders may also be applied in intermediate stages to any two-dimensional images— sprites or textures —in

2625-588: A previewer can be enabled in previous versions of Windows with the Windows Desktop Update installed through the use of folder customization templates. The default file tooltip displays file title, author, subject and comments; this metadata may be read from a special NTFS stream, if the file is on an NTFS volume, or from an OLE structured storage stream, if the file is a structured storage document. All Microsoft Office documents since Office 4.0 make use of structured storage , so their metadata

2730-691: A simple command-line interface , used to check and repair the hard drive(s), repair boot information (including NTLDR ), replace corrupted system files with fresh copies from the CD, or enable/disable services and drivers for the next boot. The console can be accessed in either of the two ways: Windows 2000 introduced Windows Script Host 2.0 which included an expanded object model and support for logon and logoff scripts. The Windows 2000 Server family consists of Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows 2000 Small Business Server, and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server. All editions of Windows 2000 Server have

2835-655: A unified model for Windows 10. A new memory model is implemented that gives each GPU a per-process virtual address space. Direct addressing of video memory is still supported by WDDMv2 for graphics hardware that requires it, but that is considered a legacy case. IHVs are expected to develop new hardware that supports virtual addressing. Significant changes have been made to the DDI to enable this new memory model. Windows 10 Anniversary Update (version 1607) includes WDDM 2.1, which supports Shader Model 6.0 (mandatory for feature levels 12_0 and 12_1), and DXGI 1.5 which supports HDR10 -

2940-434: A vertex, while pixel shaders describe the traits (color, z-depth and alpha value) of a pixel. A vertex shader is called for each vertex in a primitive (possibly after tessellation ); thus one vertex in, one (updated) vertex out. Each vertex is then rendered as a series of pixels onto a surface (block of memory) that will eventually be sent to the screen. Shaders replace a section of the graphics hardware typically called

3045-479: Is a large pixel matrix or " frame buffer ". There are three types of shaders in common use (pixel, vertex, and geometry shaders), with several more recently added. While older graphics cards utilize separate processing units for each shader type, newer cards feature unified shaders which are capable of executing any type of shader. This allows graphics cards to make more efficient use of processing power. 2D shaders act on digital images , also called textures in

3150-612: Is a list of new features for Windows Display driver development in Windows 10, version 1709: Windows 10 April 2018 Update (version 1803) includes WDDM 2.4. Updates to display driver development in Windows 10 version 1803 include the following features.: Windows 10 October 2018 Update (Version 1809) Includes WDDM 2.5. Updates to Display driver development in Windows 10, version 1809 include the following features: Windows 10 May 2019 Update (Version 1903) includes WDDM 2.6. Updates to display driver development in Windows 10 version 1903 include

3255-817: Is a user who is authorized by a public key recovery certificate to decrypt files belonging to other users using a special private key . By default, local administrators are recovery agents however they can be customized using Group Policy . Windows 2000 introduced the Logical Disk Manager and the diskpart command line tool for dynamic storage . All versions of Windows 2000 support three types of dynamic disk volumes (along with basic disks): simple volumes , spanned volumes and striped volumes : In addition to these disk volumes, Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server support mirrored volumes and striped volumes with parity : With Windows 2000, Microsoft introduced

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3360-579: Is designed to dramatically reduce workload on the kernel-mode driver for GPUs that support virtual memory addressing, to allow multithreading parallelism in the user-mode driver and result in lower CPU utilization. Windows 10 also includes DXGI 1.4. Direct3D 12 API, announced at Build 2014 , requires WDDM 2.0. The new API will do away with automatic resource-management and pipeline-management tasks and allow developers to take full low-level control of adapter memory and rendering states. The display driver model from Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone have converged into

3465-509: Is displayable in the Windows 2000 Explorer default tooltip . File shortcuts can also store comments which are displayed as a tooltip when the mouse hovers over the shortcut. The shell introduces extensibility support through metadata handlers, icon overlay handlers and column handlers in Explorer Details view . The right pane of Windows 2000 Explorer, which usually just lists files and folders, can also be customized. For example,

3570-481: Is important to note that scheduling is not a new concept but it was previously the responsibility of individual driver developers. WDDM attempts to unify the experience across different vendors by controlling the execution of GPU tasks. A Direct3D graphics surface is the memory area that contains information about the textured meshes used for rendering a 2D or 3D scene. WDDM allows Direct3D surfaces to be shared across processes . Thus, an application can incorporate

3675-581: Is integrated into Windows 2000 Explorer, unlike the separate search dialog found in all previous Explorer versions. The Indexing Service has also been integrated into the operating system and the search pane built into Explorer allows searching files indexed by its database. Microsoft released the version 3.0 of NTFS (sometimes incorrectly called "NTFS 5" in relation to the kernel version number) as part of Windows 2000; this introduced disk quotas (provided by QuotaAdvisor), file-system-level encryption , sparse files and reparse points . Sparse files allow for

3780-482: Is moved out to system RAM or to the disk. When the swapped out data is needed, it is fetched back. Virtualization could be supported on previous driver models (such as the XP Driver Model) to some extent, but was the responsibility of the driver, instead of being handled at the runtime level. The runtime handles scheduling of concurrent graphics contexts. Each list of commands is put in a queue for execution by

3885-654: Is necessary. Also, because there can be other DirectX applications running alongside DWM on the DWM-managed desktop, they must be able to access the GPU in a shared manner, necessitating scheduling. Though this is true for Microsoft's implementation of a composited desktop under Windows Vista, on the other hand, a composited desktop need not theoretically require a new display driver model to work as expected. Successful implementations of composited desktops were done before Windows Vista on other platforms such as Quartz , Compiz , WindowFX . The approach that Microsoft attempted

3990-541: Is the Desktop Window Manager . Since the desktop and application windows managed by DWM are Direct3D applications, the number of open windows directly affects the amount of video memory required. Because there is no limit on the number of open windows, the video memory available may prove insufficient, necessitating virtualization. As the window contents that DWM composes into the final desktop are generated by different processes, cross-process surface sharing

4095-649: Is the first Windows NT release to include Active Desktop , first introduced as a part of Internet Explorer 4.0 (specifically Windows Desktop Update ), and only pre-installed in Windows 98 by that time. It allowed users to customize the way folders look and behave by using HTML templates, having the file extension HTT . This feature was abused by computer viruses that employed malicious scripts, Java applets, or ActiveX controls in folder template files as their infection vector. Two such viruses are VBS/Roor-C and VBS.Redlof.a. The "Web-style" folders view, with

4200-547: Is the first system to integrate these two programs into a single utility, adopting the REGEDIT behavior with the additional NT features. The System File Checker (SFC) also comes with Windows 2000. It is a command line utility that scans system files and verifies whether they were signed by Microsoft and works in conjunction with the Windows File Protection mechanism. It can also repopulate and repair all

4305-454: Is the world's first GPU microarchitecture that supports mesh shading through DirectX 12 Ultimate API, several months before Ampere RTX 30 series was released. In 2020, AMD and Nvidia released RDNA 2 and Ampere microarchitectures which both support mesh shading through DirectX 12 Ultimate . These mesh shaders allow the GPU to handle more complex algorithms, offloading more work from the CPU to

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4410-615: The Desktop Window Manager continues to use Direct3D 9Ex. WDDM 1.1 drivers are backward compatible with WDDM 1.0 specification; both 1.0 and 1.1 drivers can be used in Windows Vista with or without the Platform Update. Windows 8 includes WDDM 1.2 and DXGI 1.2. New features were first previewed at the Build 2011 conference and include performance improvements as well as support for stereoscopic 3D rendering and video playback. Other major features include preemptive multitasking of

4515-746: The DirectX API , commonly used by game developers on Windows 98 . The last version of DirectX that was released for Windows 2000 was DirectX 9.0c (Shader Model 3.0), which shipped with Windows XP Service Pack 2. Microsoft published quarterly updates to DirectX 9.0c through the February 2010 release after which support was dropped in the June 2010 SDK. These updates contain bug fixes to the core runtime and some additional libraries such as D3DX , XAudio 2 , XInput and Managed DirectX components. The majority of games written for versions of DirectX 9.0c (up to

4620-477: The GPU , and it can be preempted by the runtime if a more critical task arrives and if it has not begun execution. This differs from native threads on the CPU where one task cannot be interrupted and therefore can take longer than necessary and make the computer appear less responsive. A hybrid scheduling algorithm between native and light threads with cooperation between the threads would achieve seamless parallelism. It

4725-456: The Metal framework . Modern video game development platforms such as Unity , Unreal Engine and Godot increasingly include node-based editors that can create shaders without the need for actual code; the user is instead presented with a directed graph of connected nodes that allow users to direct various textures, maps, and mathematical functions into output values like the diffuse color,

4830-800: The Microsoft Management Console (MMC), UDF support, the Encrypting File System (EFS), Logical Disk Manager , Image Color Management 2.0, support for PostScript 3 -based printers, OpenType (.OTF) and Type 1 PostScript (.PFB) font support (including a new font— Palatino Linotype —to showcase some OpenType features ), the Data protection API (DPAPI), an LDAP / Active Directory -enabled Address Book , usability enhancements and multi-language and locale support. Windows 2000 also introduced USB device class drivers for USB printers, Mass storage class devices , and improved FireWire SBP-2 support for printers and scanners, along with

4935-709: The Original Xbox and the Xbox 360 use a modified version of Windows 2000 as their system software . Windows 2000, originally named Windows NT 5.0, is a continuation of the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems, replacing Windows NT 4.0 . Chairman and CEO Bill Gates was originally "pretty confident" Windows NT 5.0 would ship in the first half of 1998, revealing that the first set of beta builds had been shipped in early 1997; these builds were identical to Windows NT 4.0. The first official beta

5040-427: The Windows registry , REGEDIT.EXE and REGEDT32.EXE . REGEDIT has been directly ported from Windows 98 , and therefore does not support editing registry permissions. REGEDT32 has the older multiple document interface (MDI) and can edit registry permissions in the same manner that Windows NT's REGEDT32 program could. REGEDIT has a left-side tree view of the Windows registry , lists all loaded hives and represents

5145-427: The hue , saturation , brightness ( HSL/HSV ) or contrast of an image; producing blur , light bloom , volumetric lighting , normal mapping (for depth effects), bokeh , cel shading , posterization , bump mapping , distortion , chroma keying (for so-called "bluescreen/ greenscreen " effects), edge and motion detection , as well as psychedelic effects such as those seen in the demoscene . This use of

5250-433: The pipeline , whereas vertex shaders always require a 3D scene. For instance, a pixel shader is the only kind of shader that can act as a postprocessor or filter for a video stream after it has been rasterized . 3D shaders act on 3D models or other geometry but may also access the colors and textures used to draw the model or mesh . Vertex shaders are the oldest type of 3D shader, generally making modifications on

5355-510: The DFS root, the user is really looking at a DFS link and the DFS server transparently redirects them to the correct file server and share. A DFS root can only exist on a Windows 2000 version that is part of the server family, and only one DFS root can exist on that server. There can be two ways of implementing a DFS namespace on Windows 2000: either through a standalone DFS root or a domain-based DFS root. Standalone DFS allows for only DFS roots on

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5460-674: The February 2010 release) can therefore run on Windows 2000. Windows 2000 included the same games as Windows NT 4.0 did: FreeCell , Minesweeper , Pinball , and Solitaire . Windows 2000 introduced the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), which is used to create, save, and open administrative tools. Each of these is called a console , and most allow an administrator to administer other Windows 2000 computers from one centralised computer. Each console can contain one or many specific administrative tools, called snap-ins . These can be either standalone (with one function), or an extension (adding functions to an existing snap-in). In order to provide

5565-487: The Fixed Function Pipeline (FFP), so-called because it performs lighting and texture mapping in a hard-coded manner. Shaders provide a programmable alternative to this hard-coded approach. The basic graphics pipeline is as follows: The graphic pipeline uses these steps in order to transform three-dimensional (or two-dimensional) data into useful two-dimensional data for displaying. In general, this

5670-985: The GPU with finer granularity (DMA buffer, primitive, triangle, pixel, or instruction-level), reduced memory footprint, improved resource sharing, and faster timeout detection and recovery. 16-bit color surface formats (565, 5551, 4444) are mandatory in Windows 8, and Direct3D 11 Video supports YUV 4:4:4/4:2:2/4:2:0/4:1:1 video formats with 8, 10, and 16-bit precision, as well as 4 and 8-bit palettized formats. WDDM 1.2 supports display-only and render-only WDDM drivers, such as Microsoft Basic Display Driver and WARP -based Microsoft Basic Render Driver which replaced kernel-mode VGA driver. WDDM 1.0/1.1 only allows rudimentary task scheduling using "batch queue" granularity; improvements to multitasking, as well as fast context switching and support for virtual memory , were initially expected in versions tentatively named WDDM 2.0 and WDDM 2.1, which were announced at WinHEC 2006. Windows 8.1 includes WDDM 1.3 and DXGI 1.3. New additions include

5775-795: The GPU, and in algorithm intense rendering, increasing the frame rate of or number of triangles in a scene by an order of magnitude. Intel announced that Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs shipping in Q1 2022 will support mesh shaders. Ray tracing shaders are supported by Microsoft via DirectX Raytracing , by Khronos Group via Vulkan , GLSL , and SPIR-V , by Apple via Metal . Tensor shaders may be integrated in NPUs or GPUs . Tensor shaders are supported by Microsoft via DirectML , by Khronos Group via OpenVX , by Apple via Core ML , by Google via TensorFlow , by Linux Foundation via ONNX . Compute shaders are not limited to graphics applications, but use

5880-704: The OEM channel and then were superseded by the final versions of Server 2003. Windows 2000 introduced many of the new features of Windows 98 and 98 SE into the NT line, such as the Windows Desktop Update , Internet Explorer 5 ( Internet Explorer 6 , which followed in 2001, is also available for Windows 2000), Outlook Express , NetMeeting , FAT32 support, SSE and SSE2 support, Windows Driver Model , Internet Connection Sharing , Windows Media Player 6.4, WebDAV support etc. Certain new features are common across all editions of Windows 2000, among them NTFS 3.0,

5985-829: The Windows 9x accessibility features for people with visual and auditory impairments and other disabilities into the NT-line of operating systems. These included: Additionally, Windows 2000 introduced the following new accessibility features: Windows 2000 introduced the Multilingual User Interface (MUI). Besides English , Windows 2000 incorporates support for Arabic , Armenian , Baltic , Central European, Cyrillic , Georgian , Greek , Hebrew , Indic , Japanese , Korean , simplified Chinese , Thai , traditional Chinese , Turkic , Vietnamese and Western European languages. It also has support for many different locales. Windows 2000 included version 7.0 of

6090-468: The Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) and support for feature level 12_2 and HLSL Shader Model 6.6. Windows 11 RTM Final Retail release includes WDDM 3.0, which improves graphics architecture in Windows Subsystem for Linux adding: Windows 11 2022 Update (version 22H2) includes WDDM 3.1. Windows 11 2024 Update (version 24H2) includes WDDM 3.2. Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is

6195-425: The Windows equivalent of a log file , a system information utility, a backup utility , Task Scheduler and management consoles to view open shared folders and shared folder sessions, configure and manage COM+ applications, configure Group Policy , manage all the local users and user groups, and a device manager . It contains Disk Management and Removable Storage snap-ins, a disk defragmenter as well as

6300-540: The ability to control what snap-ins can be seen in a console, the MMC allows consoles to be created in author mode or user mode . Author mode allows snap-ins to be added, new windows to be created, all portions of the console tree to be displayed and consoles to be saved. User mode allows consoles to be distributed with restrictions applied. User mode consoles can grant full access to the user for any change, or they can grant limited access, preventing users from adding snapins to

6405-957: The ability to launch multiple programs without closing the menu by holding down the SHIFT key. A Re-sort button forces the entire Start Menu to be sorted by name. The Taskbar introduces support for balloon notifications which can also be used by application developers. Windows 2000 Explorer introduces customizable Windows Explorer toolbars, auto-complete in Windows Explorer address bar and Run box, advanced file type association features, displaying comments in shortcuts as tooltips, extensible columns in Details view (IColumnProvider interface), icon overlays, integrated search pane in Windows Explorer, sort by name function for menus, and Places bar in common dialogs for Open and Save . Windows Explorer has been enhanced in several ways in Windows 2000. It

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6510-440: The ability to trim DXGI adapter memory usage, multi-plane overlays, overlapping swap chains and swap chain scaling, select backbuffer subregion for swap chain and lower-latency swap chain presentation. Driver feature additions include wireless displays ( Miracast ), YUV format ranges, cross-adapter resources and GPU engine enumeration capabilities. Graphics kernel performance improvements. [1] Windows 10 includes WDDM 2.0, which

6615-421: The beginning of the graphics pipeline . Geometry shader programs are executed after vertex shaders. They take as input a whole primitive, possibly with adjacency information. For example, when operating on triangles, the three vertices are the geometry shader's input. The shader can then emit zero or more primitives, which are rasterized and their fragments ultimately passed to a pixel shader . Typical uses of

6720-729: The console though they can view multiple windows in a console. Alternatively users can be granted limited access, preventing them from adding to the console and stopping them from viewing multiple windows in a single console. The main tools that come with Windows 2000 can be found in the Computer Management console (in Administrative Tools in the Control Panel). This contains the Event Viewer —a means of viewing system or application-related events and

6825-509: The contents of the system folders aren't displayed by default, instead showing in the right pane a warning to the user that modifying the contents of the system folders could harm their computer. It's possible to define additional Explorer panes by using DIV elements in folder template files. This degree of customizability is new to Windows 2000; neither Windows 98 nor the Desktop Update could provide it. The new DHTML-based search pane

6930-446: The context of graphics, virtualization means that individual processes (in user mode ) cannot see the memory of adjacent processes even by means of insertion of forged commands in the command stream. WDDM drivers allow video memory to be virtualized, and video data to be paged out of video memory into system RAM. In case the video memory available turns out to be insufficient to store all the video data and textures, currently unused data

7035-638: The desktop and applications using Desktop Window Manager , a compositing window manager running on top of Direct3D . It also supports new DXGI interfaces required for basic device management and creation. The WDDM specification requires at least Direct3D 9-capable video card and the display driver must implement the device driver interfaces for the Direct3D 9Ex runtime in order to run legacy Direct3D applications; it may optionally implement runtime interfaces for Direct3D 10 and higher. WDDM drivers enable areas of functionality which were not uniformly provided by earlier display driver models. These include: In

7140-420: The driver will be reset. Drivers under Windows XP were free to deal with hardware faults as they saw fit either by reporting it to the user or by attempting to recover silently. In some cases when the display driver can be safely stopped, Windows XP may instead alert about the display driver crash, while also disabling the video driver, thus switching down the screen resolution to 640x480 with only 16 colors. With

7245-485: The efficient storage of data sets that are very large yet contain many areas that only have zeros. Reparse points allow the object manager to reset a file namespace lookup and let file system drivers implement changed functionality in a transparent manner. Reparse points are used to implement volume mount points , junctions , Hierarchical Storage Management , Native Structured Storage and Single Instance Storage . Volume mount points and directory junctions allow for

7350-404: The encrypted file. To decrypt the file, the file system uses the private key of the user to decrypt the symmetric key stored in the file header. It then uses the symmetric key to decrypt the file. Because this is done at the file system level, it is transparent to the user. For a user losing access to their key, support for recovery agents that can decrypt files is built into EFS. A Recovery Agent

7455-418: The end of support on July 13, 2010, the same day that support ended for Windows XP SP2 . Windows 2000 and Windows 2000 Server were succeeded by Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 , released in 2001 and 2003, respectively. Although unreleased, it was developed on Alpha in alpha, beta, and release candidate versions. Its successor, Windows XP , only supports x86 , x64 and Itanium processors. Both

7560-673: The event of power failure, also requires WDDM. Windows 7 supports major additions to WDDM known as WDDM 1.1; the details of this new version were unveiled at WinHEC 2008. New features include: Hardware acceleration of GDI and Direct2D/DirectWrite operations helps reduce memory footprint in Windows 7, because DWM compositing engine no longer needs to keep a system memory copy of all surfaces used by GDI/GDI+, as in Windows Vista. DXGI 1.1, Direct3D 11, Direct2D, and DirectWrite were made available with Windows Vista Platform Update ; however GDI/GDI+ in Vista continues to rely on software rendering and

7665-417: The field of computer graphics. They modify attributes of pixels . 2D shaders may take part in rendering 3D geometry . Currently the only type of 2D shader is a pixel shader. Pixel shaders, also known as fragment shaders, compute color and other attributes of each "fragment": a unit of rendering work affecting at most a single output pixel . The simplest kinds of pixel shaders output one screen pixel as

7770-626: The files in the Dllcache folder. The Recovery Console is run from outside the installed copy of Windows to perform maintenance tasks that can neither be run from within it nor feasibly be run from another computer or copy of Windows 2000. It is usually used to recover the system from problems that cause booting to fail, which would render other tools useless, like Safe Mode or Last Known Good Configuration, or chkdsk . It includes commands like fixmbr , which are not present in MS-DOS. It has

7875-655: The final version first appeared in Beta 3 build 1983. Windows 2000 did not have an actual codename because, according to Dave Thompson of Windows NT team, " Jim Allchin didn't like codenames". , although Windows 2000 Service Pack 1 was codenamed "Asteroid". During development, builds for the Alpha architecture were compiled, but the project was abandoned in the final stages of development (between RC1 and RC2 ) after Compaq announced they had dropped support for Windows NT on Alpha. From here, Microsoft issued three release candidates between July and November 1999, and finally released

7980-418: The first 64 KB of memory to disk (the smallest amount of memory that is useful for debugging purposes, also known as a minidump), a dump of only the kernel's memory, or a dump of the entire contents of memory to disk, as well as write that this event happened to the Windows 2000 event log . In order to improve performance on servers running Windows 2000, Microsoft gave administrators the choice of optimizing

8085-473: The first officially released 64-bit version of Windows was Windows XP 64-Bit Edition , released alongside the 32-bit editions of Windows XP on October 25, 2001, followed by the server versions Windows Datacenter Server Limited Edition and later Windows Advanced Server Limited Edition , which were based on the pre-release Windows Server 2003 (then known as Windows .NET Server ) codebase. These editions were released in 2002, were shortly available through

8190-470: The following features: Windows 10 May 2020 Update (Version 2004) includes WDDM 2.7. Updates to display driver development in Windows 10 version 2004 include the following features: Windows 10 Insider Preview Manganese included WDDM 2.8, but no driver was ever publicly demonstrated to support it and it has been skipped for "Iron" and "Cobalt" development releases. WDDM 2.9 in Windows 10 Insider Preview "Iron" will bring support for GPU hardware acceleration to

8295-490: The following services and features built in: The Server editions include more features and components, including the Microsoft Distributed File System (DFS), Active Directory support and fault-tolerant storage. The Distributed File System (DFS) allows shares in multiple different locations to be logically grouped under one folder, or DFS root . When users try to access a network share off

8400-461: The graphics processor. The purpose is to transform each vertex's 3D position in virtual space to the 2D coordinate at which it appears on the screen (as well as a depth value for the Z-buffer). Vertex shaders can manipulate properties such as position, color and texture coordinates, but cannot create new vertices. The output of the vertex shader goes to the next stage in the pipeline, which is either

8505-608: The hardware running Windows Vista used the XDDM, with the rest already WDDM capable. It also requires some other hardware features; consequently some SM 2.0-supporting hardware such as the Intel GMA 900 fails the WDDM certification. One of the limitations of WDDM driver model version 1.0 is that it does not support multiple drivers in a multi-adapter, multi-monitor setup. If a multi-monitor system has more than one graphics adapter powering

8610-402: The introduction of Active Directory , which in the years following became a widely used directory service in business environments. Four editions of Windows 2000 have been released: Professional , Server , Advanced Server , and Datacenter Server ; the latter was both released to manufacturing and launched months after the other editions. While each edition of Windows 2000 is targeted at

8715-429: The introduction of Windows XP Professional in 2001. Windows 2000 introduces NTFS 3.0, Encrypting File System , and basic and dynamic disk storage. Support for people with disabilities is improved over Windows NT 4.0 with a number of new assistive technologies , and Microsoft increased support for different languages and locale information. The Windows 2000 Server family has additional features, most notably

8820-465: The kernel PnP Manager along with the Power Manager are two significant subsystems added in Windows 2000. Windows 2000 introduced version 3 print drivers (user mode printer drivers) based on Unidrv , which made it easier for printer manufacturers to write device drivers for printers. Generic support for 5-button mice is also included as standard and installing IntelliPoint allows reassigning

8925-458: The leaked source code" for certain versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer was reported. On April 15, 2015, GitHub took down a repository containing a copy of the Windows NT 4.0 source code that originated from the leak. Microsoft planned to release in 2000 a version of Windows 2000, specially codenamed "Janus", which would run on 64-bit Intel Itanium microprocessors . However,

9030-524: The left Explorer pane displaying details for the object currently selected, is turned on by default in Windows 2000. For certain file types, such as pictures and media files, the preview is also displayed in the left pane. Until the dedicated interactive preview pane appeared in Windows Vista , Windows 2000 had been the only Windows release to feature an interactive media player as the previewer for sound and video files, enabled by default. However, such

9135-646: The local computer, and thus does not use Active Directory. Domain-based DFS roots exist within Active Directory and can have their information distributed to other domain controllers within the domain – this provides fault tolerance to DFS. DFS roots that exist on a domain must be hosted on a domain controller or on a domain member server. The file and root information is replicated via the Microsoft File Replication Service (FRS). Shader In computer graphics ,

9240-519: The monitors, both the adaptors must use the same WDDM driver. If more than one driver is used, Windows will disable one of them. WDDM 1.1 does not have this limitation. WDDM 1.0/1.1 does not allow some modes that were previously handled by the driver such as spanning mode (stretching the desktop across two monitors) although Dual View is still available. One of the chief scenarios that the Windows Display Driver Model enables

9345-432: The operating system to partners on December 12, 1999, followed by manufacturing three days later on December 15. The public could buy the full version of Windows 2000 on February 17, 2000. Three days before this event, which Microsoft advertised as "a standard in reliability," a leaked memo from Microsoft reported on by Mary Jo Foley revealed that Windows 2000 had "over 63,000 potential known defects." After Foley's article

9450-738: The operating system's memory and processor usage patterns for background services or for applications. Windows 2000 also introduced core system administration and management features, such as the Windows Installer , Windows Management Instrumentation and Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) into the operating system. The most notable improvement from Windows NT 4.0 is the addition of Plug and Play with full ACPI and Windows Driver Model support. Similar to Windows 9x , Windows 2000 supports automatic recognition of installed hardware, hardware resource allocation, loading of appropriate drivers, PnP APIs and device notification events. The addition of

9555-512: The power of shaders. The first video card with a programmable pixel shader was the Nvidia GeForce 3 (NV20), released in 2001. Geometry shaders were introduced with Direct3D 10 and OpenGL 3.2. Eventually, graphics hardware evolved toward a unified shader model . Shaders are simple programs that describe the traits of either a vertex or a pixel . Vertex shaders describe the attributes (position, texture coordinates , colors, etc.) of

9660-485: The programmable buttons. Windows 98 lacked generic support. Driver Verifier was introduced to stress test and catch device driver bugs. Windows 2000 introduces layered windows that allow for transparency, translucency and various transition effects like shadows, gradient fills and alpha-blended GUI elements to top-level windows. Menus support a new Fade transition effect. The Start menu in Windows 2000 introduces personalized menus , expandable special folders and

9765-414: The release "our tests show the successor to Windows NT 4.0 is everything we hoped it would be. Of course, it isn't perfect either." Wired News later described the results of the February launch as "lackluster." Novell criticized Microsoft's Active Directory , the new directory service architecture, as less scalable or reliable than its own Novell Directory Services (NDS) alternative. Windows 2000

9870-404: The same execution resources for GPGPU . They may be used in graphics pipelines e.g. for additional stages in animation or lighting algorithms (e.g. tiled forward rendering ). Some rendering APIs allow compute shaders to easily share data resources with the graphics pipeline. Shaders are written to apply transformations to a large set of elements at a time, for example, to each pixel in an area of

9975-585: The screen, or for every vertex of a model. This is well suited to parallel processing , and most modern GPUs have multiple shader pipelines to facilitate this, vastly improving computation throughput. A programming model with shaders is similar to a higher order function for rendering, taking the shaders as arguments, and providing a specific dataflow between intermediate results, enabling both data parallelism (across pixels, vertices etc.) and pipeline parallelism (between stages). (see also map reduce ). The language in which shaders are programmed depends on

10080-618: The shader units instead of downsampling very complex ones from memory. Some algorithms can upsample any arbitrary mesh, while others allow for "hinting" in meshes to dictate the most characteristic vertices and edges. Circa 2017, the AMD Vega microarchitecture added support for a new shader stage—primitive shaders—somewhat akin to compute shaders with access to the data necessary to process geometry. Nvidia introduced mesh and task shaders with its Turing microarchitecture in 2018 which are also modelled after compute shaders. Nvidia Turing

10185-611: The shortcut file may be silently updated if the target moves, even to another hard drive. The Encrypting File System (EFS) introduced strong file system -level encryption to Windows. It allows any folder or drive on an NTFS volume to be encrypted transparently by the user. EFS works together with the EFS service, Microsoft's CryptoAPI and the EFS File System Runtime Library (FSRTL). To date, its encryption has not been compromised. EFS works by encrypting

10290-460: The target environment. The official OpenGL and OpenGL ES shading language is OpenGL Shading Language , also known as GLSL, and the official Direct3D shading language is High Level Shader Language , also known as HLSL. Cg , a third-party shading language which outputs both OpenGL and Direct3D shaders, was developed by Nvidia ; however since 2012 it has been deprecated. Apple released its own shading language called Metal Shading Language as part of

10395-472: The term "shader" was introduced to the public by Pixar with version 3.0 of their RenderMan Interface Specification, originally published in May 1988. As graphics processing units evolved, major graphics software libraries such as OpenGL and Direct3D began to support shaders. The first shader-capable GPUs only supported pixel shading , but vertex shaders were quickly introduced once developers realized

10500-420: The three components of a value (its name, type, and data) as separate columns of a table. REGEDT32 has a left-side tree view, but each hive has its own window, so the tree displays only keys and it represents values as a list of strings. REGEDIT supports right-clicking of entries in a tree view to adjust properties and other settings. REGEDT32 requires all actions to be performed from the top menu bar . Windows XP

10605-546: Was initially planned to replace both Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 . However, this would be changed later, as an updated version of Windows 98 called Windows 98 Second Edition was released in 1999. On or shortly before February 12, 2004, "portions of the Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0 source code were illegally made available on the Internet." The source of the leak was later traced to Mainsoft ,

10710-497: Was introduced. This protects critical Windows system files by preventing programs other than Microsoft's operating system update mechanisms such as the Package Installer , Windows Installer and other update components from modifying them. The System File Checker utility provides users the ability to perform a manual scan of the integrity of all protected system files, and optionally repair them, either by restoring from

10815-467: Was published, she claimed that Microsoft blacklisted her for a considerable time. However, Abraham Silberschatz et al. claim in their computer science textbook that "Windows 2000 was the most reliable, stable operating system Microsoft had ever shipped to that point. Much of this reliability came from maturity in the source code, extensive stress testing of the system, and automatic detection of many serious errors in drivers." InformationWeek summarized

10920-528: Was released in September 1997, followed by Beta 2 in August 1998. On October 27, 1998, Microsoft announced that the name of the final version of the operating system would be Windows 2000, a name which referred to its projected release date. Windows 2000 Beta 3 was released in May 1999. Windows NT 5.0 Beta 1 was similar to Windows NT 4.0, including a very similarly themed logo. Windows NT 5.0 Beta 2 introduced

11025-584: Was to try to make sure WDDM was a unified experience across different GPUs from multiple vendors by standardizing their features and performance. The software features missing from other driver models could be made immaterial by extensions or if a less restrictive or simply different driver model were in place. Windows Vista introduced WDDM 1.0 as a new display driver architecture designed to be better performing, more reliable, and support new technologies including HDCP . Hybrid Sleep , which combines hibernation and sleep mode functionality for enhanced stability in

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