"Within the next few weeks, Microsoft will be releasing beta 2 of Windows Vista. The actual ship date of Vista hasn't been announced, but Microsoft's new OS is likely to ship sometime this Fall. Since Windows Vista was announced, some of the bleeding-edge features have been scaled back. For example, WinFS, a file system built using relational database concepts, won't be included in the final release. But it's likely that the Windows Vista's feature list is now stable enough that we can predict what kind of system you'll need to build today to accommodate the new OS."
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Member since:2005-07-07
Well, I have the lastest version of the Vista Beta and I can say for a fact that it is pretty slow at the moment. This was on a 2.8 Ghz P4 with 1GB of DDR400 memory. The video card was "only" a GeForce 4MX (64MB), so it did not get the full Vista interface. I am hoping that Microsoft tidies up the speed before the full release. On a different note, the average price people pay for entry level PC's will go up for the machines to adequeately support Vista, so hardware companies may be able to eek some more profit thant the current generation of low end PC's.
Member since:2005-07-06
They will. Remember that betas include debug information in the binaries. Also, remember that the drivers you are using are probably not very good either. Once nVidia and ATI come out with mature driver (hopefully when Vista is released), you will see a definitely performance improvement.
Member since:2005-07-06
On a different note, the average price people pay for entry level PC's will go up for the machines to adequeately support Vista, so hardware companies may be able to eek some more profit thant the current generation of low end PC's.
This isn't necessarily true as Glass will be supported on a number of integrated chipsets as well. Existing chipsets from ATI and NVIDIA are capable of supporting Vista's full featureset, and the 945/950 chipsets from Intel are also Vista Ready.
The DWM also provides features like virtual memory and cross-process resource sharing to cut down on necessary hardware resources. In newer GPU designs, IHVs can also take advantage of the Advanced driver model and move more of the pipeline into hardware to further improve rendering efficiency, taking advantage of things like demand-paging and context-based scheduling.
Member since:
2005-07-06
And how much system memory do you ened to run smoothly?
Even people I know that love OSX admit they need at least 512mb for it to run comfortably smooth. That's about the same as Vista. Except Vista will let you run inc lassic still which will be able to run on much older hardware just fine.