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" The OS X desktop looks the same regardless of hardware, it may run slower, but it looks the same. Vista disables many graphical features and scales down the OS on older hardware. Yes I know core animation, etc. might run slower, but the apps work"

I really don't think they were refering to Aero but switching themes (even down to basic)turning off cleartype, shadows on the mouse cursor, Fading Menus, Thumbnails and about 50 other preformance killing features (same as Windows XP had in the System )Properties Area

He'd still be incorrect. And with Aero enabled, those features are accelerated by the GPU. The lowest spec machine I've run Vista on during the betas and shortly after RTM was an 800MHz Athlon T-Bird with 768MB RAM and an AGP 4x Geforce 5600 GPU. That machine is currently running Vista with the same specs and a 1GHz Duron (Athlon died when it's fan stopped working because AMD didn't have overheat protection similar to Intel until later -- Athlon XP IIRC, or maybe not until Athlon64). As with the 800MHz CPU, Vista was/is configured with all graphical options enabled.

Again, my claims are not. Vista does a lot of feature scaling based on the speed of the CPU, not just the GPU itself.



I have, can we end this pointless flame thread now?

Your original claim was that Vista had higher system requirements than Leopard and that it was "amazing" that Apple was willing to support such low-end systems where Microsoft did not. To quote you:




The claim of Vista's higher requirements was proven baseless by averycfay posting Vista's system requirements and linking you to that information on Microsoft's website.

You then tried to refute his claims (and move the original topic from minimum supported configuration to minimum supported configuration with all graphical features enabled) by saying:



This is where I came in to add that Vista can run with all graphical features enabled on the minimum supported configuration and even with Glass enabled as long as you meet the GPU requirements. This invalidates your point of Vista not looking the same on a minimal configuration. You then responded:



Which is true in general, but has no effect on the validity of my statement to which you were responding, where I stated:



It was then pointed out that you could be talking about the graphical features equivalent to those in XP. Since you initially talked about Vista not looking the same, this would naturally be interpreted as lacking Glass, which would provide a much more pronounced difference in Vista's looks than the features equivalent to XP's found in the System Properties dialog.

In any case, not oly did I point out that you can run Vista with all such features enabled, but that you'd benefit from running such features with Glass enabled as well since they then become accelerated by the GPU (for ClearType alone, it's a difference of 3 passes for pure CPU rendering vs. 1 pass on the GPU). Thus Vista will look exactly the same as it would on a higher spec configuration. I can post screenshots of such a configuration (running a 1GHZ Duron instead of 800MHz Athlon for reasons stated in my previous post -- the Duron is slower than the Athlon was despite the increase in clockspeed because it has less cache and memory bandwidth).



The point of the thread was to correct the false claims initially made regarding Apple's level of support vs Microsoft's for their latest respective OS releases. I don't see how a refutation of those claims with vendor-stated requirements and personal experience makes this a flame thread.