Windows Vista

[Darren Dirt]

LOL, oh yeah

M$ unofficial slogan...

DMR ("DRM Monitor Requirement") ... because you might otherwise think we're serious about the minimum specs!



Egad, so what should I spend the extra coin and buy the 256MB model instead of the 128MB model of my Nvidia 6600GT? So I can continue being the female dog of Gates? Idontinkso...

[Ustauk]

LOL, oh yeah

M$ unofficial slogan...

DMR ("DRM Monitor Requirement") ... because you might otherwise think we're serious about the minimum specs!



Egad, so what should I spend the extra coin and buy the 256MB model instead of the 128MB model of my Nvidia 6600GT? So I can continue being the female dog of Gates? Idontinkso...

Just by the x800 GT, it has 256 mbs by default, although it doesn't seem to help the performance versus the 6600 GT, at lease according to HardOCP.

[Lazybones]

LOL, oh yeah

M$ unofficial slogan...

DMR ("DRM Monitor Requirement") ... because you might otherwise think we're serious about the minimum specs!



Egad, so what should I spend the extra coin and buy the 256MB model instead of the 128MB model of my Nvidia 6600GT? So I can continue being the female dog of Gates? Idontinkso...

Just by the x800 GT, it has 256 mbs by default, although it doesn't seem to help the performance versus the 6600 GT, at lease according to HardOCP.

but that's because they arn't benchmarking with Vista running Areo glass in the background hogging all the memory.... :roll:

[Darren Dirt]

LOL @ both of ya... I'm thinking if the double RAM doesn't help the ATI totally kick the NVidia then there's some pretty good core stuff in the nVidia. That plus the opinions stated here that CoH seems to "like" nVidia better than ATI equals me prolly getting a 6600. When I get a round tuit.

[Shayne]

but that's because they arn't benchmarking with Vista running Areo glass in the background hogging all the memory.... :roll:

Aero glass turns off when an application such as a game is running full screen.  Has no effect on performance.

[Lazybones]

but that's because they arn't benchmarking with Vista running Areo glass in the background hogging all the memory.... :roll:

Aero glass turns off when an application such as a game is running full screen.  Has no effect on performance.

True, but I am sure that your windowed performance would be very poor. And if you run multi monitor I am sure you would have the desktop still visible on the second display..



I know for MMO's I often have a browser and map open on my second display while playing.

[Shayne]

Im not sure if would say very poor.  Remember that the GUI is now GPU rendered.  So while it might shave a few FPS off, i doubt it would be as harsh as the current XP GUI (Luna turned on).



You could also set profiles so that when certain applications are launched that Aero Glass turns off.  So if you have a MMORPG, you can set game.exe to turn off the gui when running which gives you a non-gpu rendered version similar to what you see in Luna.



Its really a non-issue, more nit-picky then anything.  I run Windows Classic theme, and that theme will remain in the Vista (the beta news groups verify this, and the reason is so that corporations can keep continuity as they move between generations).



In fact, id be curious to know what your perfect solution to this is since it seems like anything that Vista has people tend to complain about.

[Lazybones]

Actualy I am interested in the new destop stuff, its just that I suspect to use it you will need a high end system or see a slow down.



My biggest problem is that it appears to be XP 1.5 with allmost all of the attractive features that where promised stripped..



It's really going to be a wait and see thing..

[Cova]

LOL @ both of ya... I'm thinking if the double RAM doesn't help the ATI totally kick the NVidia then there's some pretty good core stuff in the nVidia. That plus the opinions stated here that CoH seems to "like" nVidia better than ATI equals me prolly getting a 6600. When I get a round tuit.

If video RAM effected performance the way system RAM does, that might be a valid arguement.  But since video RAM just holds textures and geometry, and (with texture compression) most games can fit all that stuff into 128MB (since the vast majority of cards only have that much or less), having more video RAM really doesn't help at all.  More vid RAM = bigger textures/more geometry/bigger framebuffer (higher-res antialiasing) = overall better quality, not much of a performance difference.  Faster/wider vid RAM has been the biggest performance bottleneck in vid cards since hardware 3D acceleration came about - of course now thats changing with the latest shader programs able to generate geometry and textures on the fly.  There's now less and less to store (just a single curve instead of thousands of verticies of triangles - they'll be generated as needed), and more and more shader processing power needed, and future-gen cards are starting to show this (the 7800, and xbox-360/PS3 are just starting to see this change).



Back semi-on-topic for Vista...  taking into consideration Vista is also being designed for very high-res displays, and using the GPU to scale all the vector info (windows, fonts, graphics, everything else that makes up a screen, etc) into a bitmap (it does need to be turned into a texture for the GPU to process it and apply it to a 3D surface - I really doubt they're builing every letter on the screen out of polygons), there's potentially a lot of VERY high-res textures that the GPU will need to access many times per second (the FPS you want your desktop to run at).  And these aren't your standard tileable wall/floor textures and stuff - it'll be textures represending every window on screen, and they can't be made smaller in resolution, or compressed with lossy compression, or all the text is going to look like you're running an LCD at non-native resolution.  I think Vista is going to require a LOT of texture storage, and a very high speed bus to move these textures from system RAM to video RAM, and back.  AGP does a decent job of moving stuff from system RAM to video, but I think PCI has more bandwidth for bi-directional transfers - PCI-express solves both problems.

[Shayne]

Keep in mind that your desktop isnt in constant motion, so constantly rerendering unchanged items would be poor design.  Microsoft has some of the smartest people on the planet working on this, i got faith.



Again though, you can go old school XP/2K if you want.  Still available.