For the Edge browser there’s simple stuff like webpage composition which is GPU-enabled – the browser is very choppy without good healthy GPU acceleration.

For applications, movies and TV video players you need video decoding. Windows 10 has a ton of stuff in it that requires functional silicon to power the experience. To do that you need to acknowledge that people primarily interact with their computer for work or entertainment but behind the scenes Windows 10, more than any other version of Windows, uses a heck of a lot of compute and/or dedicated functional silicon like accelerated video decode and encode to provide that experience. That’s an absolutely massive market and we think we are ideally positioned to deliver a great Windows 10 experience. The key thing to know about Windows is that there’s 1.5 billion users’ worth of opportunity for getting Windows right. The following is an edited excerpt from his wide-ranging comments. While microprocessor makers and Microsoft still align their work, Hallock says that DirectX 12 will mean that even a lot of existing hardware will boost Windows 10, so long as the appropriate drivers are installed.

In particular, Hallock took apart Windows 10’s role as a delivery platform for DirectX 12, Microsoft’s latest family of APIs for handling graphics, motion video and other rich media. On the eve of the Windows 10 launch Robert Hallock, technical marketing manager of chip maker AMD, ran a live stream giving his take on the release and providing some fascinating insights into the mechanics of Windows 10. But what of those that labour at the low-level end of the software and hardware pools, the ‘makers’ who have to figure out the knotty questions of driver support and optimising silicon for the new operating system? Windows 10 is a huge deal for Microsoft, a very large deal indeed for computer makers, a major event for application software developers, and a pretty big one for end users.

Directx 12 windows 10