“Nearly two years ago Microsoft announced that Windows Vista would sport a so-called ‘tiered’ graphical experience. The user interface would remain the essentially the same no matter what graphical prowess a machine was blessed with, but the best of the eye-candy and the whiz-bang effects would be reserved for the most modern of computers. While Microsoft has not put the official seal of **CONFIRMED** on any recommended hardware configurations, we have a good idea of what the company will consider as the base for the full-flavored, full-bodied Aero Glass experience.”
have I stepped back to 2003 and read this ?
we have all known for years that Vista will need a decent graphics card to show a decent interface, and if none is present then it will show a crapper version.
why were we sent to this article ?
the only reason I can see was to clarify the misinterpreted announcement that machines that could not show the full aero would not be able to run Vista.
WE KNOW THIS
WE HAVE KNOWN THIS FOR AGES
the only reason I can see was to clarify the misinterpreted announcement that machines that could not show the full aero would not be able to run Vista.
You answered your own question.
The point of the article was to clarify and reiterate the facts. Sadly, I think it’s kind of neccesary, because people are quick to believe the sensationalist articles about Vista that seem to come out.
“Vista’s Aero Glass: a Tiered Graphical Experience”
They misspelled “tired”.
Heh. Oops there goes my karma, er points.. you know.
“They misspelled “tired”.”
As apposed to what…KDE and Gnome? Yeah, we all know what rich, fresh, innovative graphical environments those desktops are…for a Circa 1998 GUI.
It’s in their interest not to have most current computers run all the bells and whistles. That way, you have to buy a new computer and the bundled Vista with it (MS tax). MS and their hardware buddies win out, you lose. Though you can always still run Novell’s XGL dekstop. Bet that one will run on almost anything.
How do you lose? No one is forcing you to upgrade. You’re not paying any more for Vista than you would for previous versions of Windows.
Though you can always still run Novell’s XGL dekstop. Bet that one will run on almost anything.
Sure, until you have a lot of windows open. Buffering windows in VRAM is expensive you know.
Forced upgrades happen. I was forced to upgrade my work PC to Office 2003 from Office 2000, for example, because we had a third-party tool which generated documents that were readable by components in Office 2003 and which had totally dropped support for Office 2000 formats.
If I didn’t update MS Office, that third-party tool was effectively useless.
Similar tie-ins exist in *many* applications, quite a few of them not from Microsoft.
Hey buddy, we’re talking about *Windows* here, not Office. See my above reply.
> Though you can always still run Novell’s XGL dekstop. Bet that one will run on almost anything.
Yeah, everything, except the hardware that you can’t get 3D accelerated drivers for.
Like which hardware? Nvidia makes excellent drivers for Linux. Intel has drivers for Linux also. Even ATI has Linux drivers. They aren’t the greatest yet but they are getting better and if you have an older ATI card you can even get opensource drivers. Did I mention that there are also drivers for Matrox cards? Sure not everything is supported but there will probably be more hardware out there that will run XGL than Vista when Vista is released.
You know, I agreed with you until this line:
Sure not everything is supported but there will probably be more hardware out there that will run XGL than Vista when Vista is released.
This is where you cross the line into zealotry. I love OSS as much as anyone, but if there’s one thing you can’t argue is that Windows has the best driver support out there, if only due to market position. Everyone makes drivers for Windows first, and then if you’re lucky (or have some extremely gifted OSS guy) you get Linux drivers.
Let’s get real here. By the time Vista ships, any PC bought within the last 3-4 years will be DX9 capable, and if not, chances are that machine will be upgraded to just happen to have a card that is. That doesn’t mean it will run Vista well, but it’ll run it.
Oh, and the ATI drivers for Linux are atrocious. If you want decent 3D acceleration in Linux, stick with NVidia.
Let’s get real here. By the time Vista ships, any PC bought within the last 3-4 years will be DX9 capable, and if not, chances are that machine will be upgraded to just happen to have a card that is. That doesn’t mean it will run Vista well, but it’ll run it.
Well lets think about this a little. Pretty much any ATI card before the 9200 (with enough vram of course) will run XGL. That is not true of Vista. In fact I would be surprised if Vista ran at all on these machines. Any Nvidia card that is at least a GeForce2 will run XGL. Any Intel card will run XGL (again with at least enough vram). In the meantime who knows what could happen to ATIs drivers on Linux. Everyone knows they are not that good but they are getting better.
Now think about what kind of computer most people own. Most people own a computer with IGP. Most of those computers use either Intel or sometimes ATI. Until not too long ago ATI was still shipping the 9000 in their IGP setups. I’m willing to bet their are a lot more computers in use today that are not DX9 capable (what intel shipped until recently) than their is with high end ATI cards.
The problem is that geeks tend to think that everyone has the latest and greatest hardware just because they do. The only people who even care about video cards are gamers, and believe it or not there are not as many of you as you think.
Repetorum est mater studiorum. But how long you’re going to post these articles about Vista’s availability to run not only on superior PCs?
Repitition is the mother of enthusiasm? Or the mother of pursuit/study/devotion?
Quid quid latine dictum sit, altum videtur. But only if it’s right
. I can’t find repetorum in my dictionary anyway, maybe you wanted repetere?
“Anything said in Latin, sounds profound”
I’ve heard lots of things about vista, soem people thinks it will need a lot of ram and GPU processing power
The question is: the resource comsuption is there because of the bloat, or because the there’re lots of graphics effects everywhere?
To those of us who simply want a desktop interface on which to run multiple application programs, those fancy graphics effects *are* bloat!
Aero Glass runs just fine on the Intel 915 integrated graphics chipset. That’s pixel shader 2.0 on the graphics chip and vertex shader 2.0 code handled by the CPU. All in all that’s less dedicated graphics hardware than either the nVidia 5000 series or the ATI 9000 series. Both of those series of cards were released in the late 2002-mid 2003 timeframe. When Vista is released at the end of this year (supposedly) those cards will be pushing four years old.
Why are people making such a big stink out of this? So nVidia GF4 series and ATi 8XXX series cards can’t run Aero Glass. If the computer owner is such an entusiast that he/she wants to run Vista he/she can either upgrade their graphics hardware (ATI 9600 cards cost well under $100 US these days) or run Vista with the graphics turned down. The majority of computer users, though, are going to get Vista with new computer purchases. Since it’s practically impossible to get a new computer these days that doesn’t have some sort of newer nVidia, ATI, or Intel graphics technology in it there’ll be no problem running Vista w/ Aero Glass on those boxes.
The only machines where this could even be considered to be a problem are the legions of aging corporate machines that were bought in the Windows 98/98SE days and are still running those OSs. If the corporations haven’t upgraded hardware or OSs by now there’s no reason to believe they’ll do it for Vista.
This whole thing is such a non-issue.
Edited 2006-02-13 23:53
…someone will get Vista running on an 8086 with 256K of RAM and dual floppies.
…Microsoft wants to be in the headlines every single day.
Odd. I didn’t know Microsoft published this article nor even released any new information that would cause this article.
“…Microsoft wants to be in the headlines every single day.”
Well thank God they don’t release a new build once a week just to do so.
I have OS X 10.4.3 running on my laptop with Intel 955GM. On this slow, crappy, video chip I get full effects. Shadows, ripples, cubes, you name it on two monitors. This is on hardware Apple never intended the OS to run on. Nothing I’ve seen in Vista is more remarkable than what OS X can do (from what I’ve seen). Why are the requirments that high for full acceleration. What is Microsoft doing that requires that much power?
Ripples and cubes with drop shadows is simple stuff. You have realtime bumpmapping, shaddow maps and basically everything beyond regular openGL.
Nothing I’ve seen in Vista is more remarkable than what OS X can do (from what I’ve seen). Why are the requirments that high for full acceleration. What is Microsoft doing that requires that much power?
This has been stated many times. The bottom line is that MS handles both drawing and composition on the GPU and utilizes the programmable shader pipeline for effects, ClearType text rendering, and, in general, for greater overall quality and efficiency. Quality and efficiency are the major reasons why the baseline for Glass is set at D3D 9 hardware. This isn’t a steep requirement since such hardware is now around 3 – 4 years old and can be had for as little as $25 assuming you don’t already have an integrated or add-in solution that meets this requirement and you want Glass. Several integrated chipsets from ATI and NVIDIA, and some, especially newer chipsets from Intel (including the chipset in the Intel Macs) support Glass. Depending on the hardware and driver model, they also make use of basic and advanced virtual memory and scheduling models for more efficient resource usage. This scales with hardware support. Apple currently only does composition in hardware. Hardware accelerated drawing, along with resolution independance, and GPU virtual memory will come with Quartz 2D Extreme as detailed on Apple’s developer site as well as third-party sites like Ars Technica.
>It’s in their interest not to have most current
>computers run all the bells and whistles. That way,
>you have to buy a new computer and the bundled Vista >with it (MS tax). MS and their hardware buddies win
>out, you lose. Though you can always still run
>Novell’s XGL dekstop. Bet that one will run on
>almost anything.
You have to choice to buy it or you don’t have to buy it, it’s not a tax.
If you knew about putting your own computer together you would understand that an MS Tax does not exist.
Also if you want to run more programs in the future that are 64-bit or Direct X 10 apps or games how do you exactly lose? Getting more value is a loss?
No more posting while you are drunk.
XGL desktop sucks though? Why would anyone want to run that?
Using my brain FTW
I think the best response here is to collect a list of the new features known so far and have a contest to predict which ones will be turned off first.
DirectX 9 came out on December 20th, 2002
DirectX 10 will come out when Windows Vista Ships which will probably be December 2006.
That is a total of 4 years since DirectX 9
has been out.
Windows Vista comes built in with DX 9 as standard
and DX 10 as standard as well
Slow news day, eh OSNew.com?
You ask how I loose. From years of upgrading in a corporate environment, I have seen this over and over:
0) IT announces that the current version of Windows is good enough to meet the needs of the business and they are not recomending spending thousands per workstation to upgrade.
1) a new computer (typically a laptop) is purchased with the latested version of WIndows. The new version has Office SuperNew installed. The exec with the new computer agrees to use ‘Save as’ and to save doucments in the ‘standard’ format.
2) second exec gets similar laptop. doesn’t know/care about the ‘save as’ rule. some bad things happen when trying to read IMPORTANT DOCUMENT that isn’t accessable to anyone else in the company.
3) wierd stuff starts happening with networking the new computers. IT is called a bunch of idiots that are stuck in the past and they have failed to keep up with their own field.
4) IT is forced to upgrade Windows. All of the money that was going to be used to improve {process control/security/business applications} get sucked up in upgrading Windows. The oldest 1/3 of the PCs are replaced and most of the others play ‘musical chairs’ as the executives get the new PCs and the people that are acutally using the PCs get the hand-me-downs. The other PCs limp along, hopefully with a memory upgrade.
—————–
So that is what I loose if someone else upgrades. Microsoft bundles everything together. If you want the latest Office, you need the latest OS, etc.
That’s a problem with Office, not Windows.
Last time I checked, you can find systems with and without Office preinstalled (in fact, I don’t know if I’ve seen one with it installed?).
Nice try though.
i’m thoroughly excited abot this release, including support for my favorite applications like harvard graphics and foxpro. also my favrotie utilities, like phar lap dos extender should continue to get tier 1 quality support. i can’t wait to see the new Hercules Graphics support as well as the ability to attach up to ten Sentry(tm) dongles for managing software licenses.