Transparancy effects in the windows GUI

[clicknext]

How much do things like transparent windows and such decrease performance compared to non-transparent?

 

[AndyHui]

It IS fairly taxing on the system, since it is all done in software.

While I can't give you a quantitative amount of decrease, the slow down is very noticeable, especially if you have a lot of Windows open, or you start to drag things around. I suggest you give it a try and see if you find the speed acceptable.

 

[ProviaFan]

Some transparency effects are supposed to be accelerable (is that even a word?) on some video cards, but apparently neither my Radeon SDR or my Radeon VE can accelerate them, because transparency effects run like crap on large windows even on my Athlon XP 1700+ when overclocked to 2GHz.

The following isn't exactly pertinent to the discussion right now, but in a few years Microsoft's "Longhorn" Windows will be out; it is supposed to use DirectX to accelerate transparency features of the UI, so maybe then the kind of effects you want to use will be fluid enough that they won't slow the whole system down to a crawl when you start to drag a window.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Transparency with nView is done in quasi-hardware. You can use PowerMenu (freeware) to manually force windows to be transparent (from 0%-100% transparent in 10% gradients, very nice!) as well as other handy functions like minimize-to-tray.

PowerMenu = teh 0wnx0r

- M4H