Microsoft employee Rob Copeland has posted an interesting blog on the Microsoft website explaining why Windows 8 graphics are an improvement over previous versions of Windows. The author claims that hardware acceleration has increased performance considerably. While one might expect that the pretty much 2D Metro GUI should give less load on the PC, it seems that isn't true. Microsoft had to make sure 2D and text rendering was faster than ever. No longer is 2D, soooo 80's, it's totally 2012, the same goes for text, according to the blog.
To improve the speed of Windows 8 they first developed new tests to measure if they actually made improvements. Then they optimized default text rendering in Metro style apps and to for improved 2D graphics, they introduced Target Independent Rasterization which increases performance as the GPU get much earlier involved then how it previously worked. Also rendering images has been optimized, by using faster encoding and decoding techniques.
If you'd like the full explanation, read the entire blog post here (and read the anti Windows 8 comments below the post)
