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The builds without the start menu that aren't part of the main branch are probably the ones they are working on for tablet only I'd bet.  The start menu is something you'll see only on traditional desktops and laptops from what I've been hearing, the system will, or should, change depending on the hardware connected.

 

As interesting as the desktop side changes are, because I still mostly use my desktop compared to my tablet, i'm much more interested in what they do with WP and RT and making them one OS for phone and tablet.

 

The way I understood it was that there will be no more start screen, but the new start menu will be able to go full screen. Any ideas about that?

The way I understood it was that there will be no more start screen, but the new start menu will be able to go full screen. Any ideas about that?

I know that your comment was not directed toward me, but I would hate if the Start screen is not available as an option, especially since the interactive Live Tiles shown by Microsoft Research look so interesting . . .

The start screen will not go away. What I think Microsoft will do is: if you're using a desktop/laptop, the start menu is enabled by default. If you're using a tablet/touch device, the start screen is enabled by default. Users will then a have a choice to continue using the default start, or change to another.

I know that your comment was not directed toward me, but I would hate if the Start screen is not available as an option, especially since the interactive Live Tiles shown by Microsoft Research look so interesting . . .

 

Here's where the story comes from: http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/start-menu-will-replace-start-screen-threshold

 

The Threshold Start menu already has a side for tiles, so a maximized Start menu would basically be the same thing as the Start screen plus a traditional Start menu column on the left. I'd assume there's a way to hide the traditional column too.

Here's where the story comes from: http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/start-menu-will-replace-start-screen-threshold

 

The Threshold Start menu already has a side for tiles, so a maximized Start menu would basically be the same thing as the Start screen plus a traditional Start menu column on the left. I'd assume there's a way to hide the traditional column too.

That's . . . not what I wanted to hear.

Are there builds of Windows vNext without a start menu: yes. Are they part of the main branch: no.

Tks Brad for finally decided to share this info, although (some) OEM people had even known about it for quite a while.

Could you clarify slightly further? : Does winmain builds has it? - yes, no, or you don't know. Tks.

Btw, clever move to say "vNext". :)

The Start Screen should still be there. Microsoft is said to be including more customization features for it.

I really hope so. My concern is not just about the Start screen itself, because it is difficult for me to imagine how one would (enjoyably) use the interactive Live Tiles on the Start menu . . .

I really hope so. My concern is not just about the Start screen itself, because it is difficult for me to imagine how one would (enjoyably) use the interactive Live Tiles on the Start menu . . .

 

I assume that when the new start menu is maximized it will function like the start screen we have now, hopefully with some improvements obviously

The main one i'm hoping for is the ability to move tiles around freely like you can on WP, without all the other tiles rearranging

I assume that when the new start menu is maximized it will function like the start screen we have now, hopefully with some improvements obviously

The main one i'm hoping for is the ability to move tiles around freely like you can on WP, without all the other tiles rearranging

 

Without knowing what the final new start menu will look like (other than that early version they showed us) and what changes they're making to the start screen itself, it'd be hard to say if when you "maximize" the start menu you just get a full screen version of it or not.   I doubt that's the case though, when it's a menu it makes more sense to show a app list or something more than just the tiles, but when it's a full screen like now in 8 then you don't have to show that stuff.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if the menu itself has a toggle switch you can click on, or at the least they just have a option you can set in the taskbar properties or in PC Settings.    It also shouldn't be a surprise to see more things from WPs start screen make their way into the Windows version, like what you talk about but also the new live folders feature they just added to WP8.1.1.  

The PCBeta guy has updated his FB profile page, although personally I think it's a funny idea for not posting links, anyway, a promise is a promise, it's not difficult to find the post. :)

 

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Any idea which major features will be present in the Windows Technical Preview next month? Is there an Internet Explorer 12 in there?

 

You know, with the whole Developer Channel release they did a while ago, you'd expect a newer version of IE will be in this TP, but I also expected them to have updated the DC by now, and they haven't. 

Since we heard about "Windows 365", we only know a name, and it has been under development in MS, now thee is a (very) vague idea:

The Bing translation is awful, here's the proper translation:
Windows 365 is something similar to Office 365, but inside there is a "bundle of things"(probably some components), and so there's a difference, can only know the details when this "thing" is developed by the win365 team.

screen1723.jpg


Btw, Brad has stated in a very carefully phrased statement that he has not seen start menu in his friedn's copy, he probably has some kind of private NDA so I won't go further, but I talked with a OEM guy, his copy doesn't has it either, and his comment was, he wouldn't rule out it could exists in some branch copy, but has to consider this :

Start menu is not just another independent feature, it calls everything inside the Windows OS, functions/features/apps/softwares, e.g., if for the team developing mail apps, naturally they need to test if the mail app tile will work properly in the start menu, not just the tile could launch, but the live tiles, interactive functions, tile settings, etc, insdie the start menu which has its own complicated API for different settings of the menu itself. :)

Start menu is present In 982X builds, I haven't seen 983X yet.

 

OK, when can you spill the beans??? All this cryptic stuff is driving me mad!!!!! :)

 

Can you give us something on that new start menu? Have you seen it maximized?

Does it still have the same functionality as in Win 8.1 when it's maximized?

...

i wish if they could merge those 2 control panel into one

If they could I would rather them merge all the settings across everything into one. For example, changing file permissions dialogue has many different windows that pops up, viewing wifi saved wifi password also opens up a separate box etc.

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If they could I would rather them merge all the settings across everything into one. For example, changing file permissions dialogue has many different windows that pops up, viewing wifi saved wifi password also opens up a separate box etc.

I thought he meant that by combining the two, that all settings would be shared between the two. I must have misread his comment . . .

I thought he meant that by combining the two, that all settings would be shared between the two. I must have misread his comment . . .

 

He either meant that or, probably, that instead of two control panels they just have one.   It's going to take a good bit of time to redo all the different advanced settings boxes that pop up when you start to dig into control panel.  With PC Settings, starting new, they've been adding the most used stuff, but even now if you look there are some things that aren't in PC Settings but in the settings charm flyout window to the right.  Like start screen personalization comes to mind.    In general they have things scattered all around the place, it would be best to put them all together into one area IMO.

In general they have things scattered all around the place, it would be best to put them all together into one area IMO.

I would love it if they added everything to PC Settings since the interface seems to be much more consistent than the Control Panel with its various dialog boxes, windows, et cetera . . .

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    • AMD RX 9070 GRE AI, Blender benchmarks vs 9070 XT, 7800XT, Nvidia RTX 5070, 4070 by Sayan Sen Earlier this week, we shared the first part of our review of AMD's new RX 9070 GRE. It was about the gaming performance of the GPU, and we gave it an 8 out of 10. As a follow-up, similar to how we did with the 9070 XT and non-XT, we are doing a dedicated productivity review for the RX 9070 GRE as well, where we compare it against the 9070 XT, 9070, 7800 XT, as well as Nvidia's 5070 and 4070. This will include AI, rendering, compute, and more benchmarks. AI performance, especially, is a very important metric in today's world, and AMD also promised big improvements thanks to its underlying architectural improvements. We will be pitching it against the data we already have for the RX 9070, and RX 9070 XT, but also the Nvidia 5070 FE, MSI GeForce RTX 4070 VENTUS 2X 12G, and Gigabyte Radeon RX 7800 XT GAMING OC 16G as they are in a similar price class, but also because we do not have a comparable 5060 Ti card lying around here that we can compare it against. Before we get underway, this is a collaboration between Sayan Sen and Steven Parker, who lent me his test bed. Also, there was no editorial input from AMD. First up, the specs of the RX 9070, 9070 XT, and 9070 GRE, which were given to us by AMD: Radeon RX 9070 GRE Radeon RX 9070 Radeon RX 9070 XT Boost Clock: Game Clock: up to 2.79GHz up to 2.20GHz up to 2.52GHz up to 2.07GHz up to 2.97GHz up to 2.40GHz Stream Processors 3,072 (48 CU) 3,584 (56 CU) 4,096 (64 CU) Ray Accelerator 48 56 64 AI Accelerator 96 112 128 ROPs 96 128 Texture Mapping Units 192 224 256 Memory 12 GB GDDR6, 18Gbps Clock, 192-bit Bus 432 GB/s 16 GB GDDR6, 20Gbps Clock, 256-bit Bus Effective Memory Bandwidth: 640 GB/s Infinity Cache 48 MB (3rd Gen) 64 MB (3rd Gen) Card Bus PCI-E 5.0 X16 Output 2x HDMI 2.1b 2x DisplayPort 2.1a Power consumption 220W 304W Recommended PSU 650W 750W Slot width 2x 3x Price (SEP) $549 $599 As you can see from the specs above, it is less than the standard RX 9070 in every way that counts, except for slightly higher Boost and Game clock speed. Design Moving on, the RX 9070 GRE we were given is an XFX Swift triple-fan, dual-slot design with two 8-pin connectors. At 30cm (self-measured), it will fit in most systems easily. There is no RGB either. The AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE by XFX from all angles. Test system Our test system consists of the following: Lian Li O11 Dynamic Mini V2 Flow (Amazon|Newegg) ASUS Z890 ProArt Creator WiFi (Amazon|Newegg) Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus (Amazon|Newegg) Thermal Grizzly KryoSheet - 44x37 (Amazon|Newegg) 2x 16GB G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB (7200 MT/s in XMP) (Amazon|Newegg) Sabrent Rocket4 Plus 2TB SSD (Amazon) Windows 11 25H2 (Build 26200.8246) AMD shared a press driver based on the recently released Adrenaline 26.5.2 that we were required to use. We now move on to our benchmarks. First up, we have Geekbench AI running on ONNX. For some reason, the 9070 GRE does exceptionally well here in both half-precision (FP16) and single-precision (FP32). It manages to beat the RTX 5070 and RX 9070 non-XT, and is only behind the 9070 XT. Since Geekbench runs in short bursts instead of continuously hammering the graphics card, it seems the GRE's faster boost clocks are helping here. Next up, we move to the UL Procyon AI test suite, starting with the image generation benchmark. We chose the Stable Diffusion XL FP16 test since it is the most intense workload available on Procyon. The Nvidia cards do very well here, as even the 4070 out-muscles AMD's best fairy easily. The positive thing about the GRE is that it gets quite close to the 9070 non-XT in this test; this indicates that the VRAM does not play a very big role here, as SD XL relies on float16 (FP16). So this is something to keep in mind again. If you wish to work with float32 AI workloads, graphics cards with larger than 12 GB buffers would likely emerge as victors. Regardless, the gains are still massive on AMD's 9000 series compared to the 7000 series. Following image generation, we move to the text generation benchmark. This is one test where the 9070 GRE struggled, quite a lot. It seems that the 12 GB VRAM and lower memory bandwidth of the new Radeon 9070 GRE are hurting it quite a bit; the split is massive, especially in a test like Llama2, which packs 13 billion parameters. As such, in all the tests, the 9070 GRE is the slowest of the lot. Next, we tried Blender, and here the AMD GPUs were beaten by Nvidia. Rendering is something the Green team has always had a lead over the Red side, and it has not changed so far. On the positive side, though, the 9070 GRE shows significantly better results than the 7800 XT, which means AMD is on the right path. Catching up to Nvidia, though, will require a lot more effort. And we hope HIP and ROCm can keep improving. Wrapping up AI testing, we measured OpenCL throughput in the Geekbench compute benchmark. The RX 9070 GRE alongside the 9070 did not fare well here at all, even falling behind the 7800 XT. Interestingly, even the RTX 5070 could not beat the 4070 on OpenCL, so perhaps this suggests that OpenCL optimization may not have been a priority for either AMD or Nvidia in the modern era. Conclusion We reached the end of our productivity performance review of the 9070 GRE, and we have to say it's a mixed bag. Unlike the 9070 and 9070 XT, the GRE excels in some areas while losing ground fairly easily in others. Similar to how it happened in gaming, any time the card's memory subsystem gets hammered, it tends to fall behind the others. This was the case with text generation, wherein we saw the VRAM sometimes hit its maximum available 12 GB of usage with larger model sizes. So what do we make of the RX 9070 as a productivity hardware? It can certainly be used, but you have to know it has its limitations. For those looking for a GPU that can deal with more, AMD recently unveiled the Radeon AI PRO R9700, which is essentially a 32 GB refresh of the 9070 XT with some additional workstation-based optimizations. On a similar note, the new Ryzen AI Halo platform is something you can consider if you want to set up a local AI processing station. Considering everything, we rate AMD's Radeon RX 9070 GRE a 7.5 out of 10 for its productivity performance. Price is less of a factor for those looking at productivity cases compared to those considering the GPU for gaming, and as such, we felt it did quite decently on many occasions and can be handy if you need a 12 GB GPU and, for some reason, don't want to get Nvidia. Purchase links: RX 9070 / XT / GRE (Amazon US) As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
    • Does anyone here know if these updates are integrated into the UUP dump isos?
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