Huddled Masses

Posts Tagged ‘Shift Operator’

So earlier today someone asked how they could tell if PowerBoots graphics would be hardware accelerated on their system … and I found the question painful to answer because the answer is that you take the high-order word of the RenderCapability.Tier property, and that indicates 0, 1, or 2 … where a higher number indicates a higher level of hardware acceleration:

• Rendering Tier 0 No graphics hardware acceleration. The DirectX version level is less than version 7.0.
• Rendering Tier 1 Partial graphics hardware acceleration. The DirectX version level is greater than or equal to version 7.0, and lesser than version 9.0.

• Rendering Tier 2 Most graphics features use graphics hardware acceleration. The DirectX version level is greater than or equal to version 9.0.

Shift-Left 1, via Wikipedia

The problem is that in PowerShell, getting the “high-order word” of an integer is a little annoying, because the normal way to do that is to right-shift the integer to throw away the low-order word … and PowerShell is missing the shift operators. Why? I don’t know. In any case, I figured, well, I’ll just write it as a function with a call out to C# to make my life simpler. The one catch is that the Add-Type cmdlet that lets you inject C# classes is new in PowerShell 2.0, so if you want to use this script in PowerShell 1.0 you need to get the New-Type function from PoshCode and replace Add-Type with New-Type in the script.