Inital beta release of Rainmeter 4.3

[jsmorley]

Direct2D and Hardware Acceleration: Rainmeter 4.3 has changed entirely from using an older GDI+ graphics engine in Windows to the more modern and capable Direct2D (known as D2D for short). Not only does D2D offer additional capabilities we will be taking advantage of in the near future, but it also allows us to optionally support hardware acceleration. (known as HWA for short) This means that some of the processing, and the memory used, can be offloaded from the CPU to the GPU, and things will be rendered or "draw" significantly faster.

As of the early 4.3 betas, hardware acceleration defaults to "off". This to help us to identify general issues that might come up with the conversion from GDI+ to D2D, and isolate any problems that are strictly related to hardware acceleration. Hardware acceleration can be turned "on" in the Settings dialog, and we recommend it. Future updates will change the default to "on" in Rainmeter.

Hardware acceleration and Intel HD integrated graphics: There is a known issue with certain Intel HD integrated graphics chips, often seen on laptop computers, and hardware acceleration. This is due to a bug in the drivers for these chips from Intel, and the problem can generally be solved by updating your system to the most recent version of the graphics drivers from Intel. Details and suggestions for this issue are at: Intel HD Graphics drawing issue(s) with hardware acceleration.

Reporting problems with Direct2D: For this beta, we would be very interested in anything you see that is "different" for you when using Rainmeter 4.3. Things that looked different in Rainmeter 4.2. The goal here is to first ensure that we fully protect backwards compatibility with existing skins in the change from GDI+ to D2D. Any skin you run in Rainmeter 4.2 should look and work exactly the same in Rainmeter 4.3. Please report these issue in this forum area: Rainmeter 4.3 Beta.