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[captainnem]

I'm so far behind livejournal :) but I will go back and catch up I promiseIn other news I've been playing with Windows Vista on my system at home for the last .... week or so now, and generally I think I'm not too impressed. I know it'll improve with time (I remember how bad XP was compared to Win2k when XP was first released, and now their

Comments

[captainnem]

haha I wouldn't say it's greedy ... that's what I do on my system at home and I paid for them both so I daresay I deserve to run 'em :)

Aero only needs DirectX 9, I can use it fine even on my laptop, and the only cards out at the moment afaik that do DX10 are the nVidia 8800 series GPU's, and I'm certainly not upgrading to one of those anytime soon heh. I don't know if the onboard intel gfx card would even do DirectX 9, but I have found if you cream the absolute shit out of the system Windows disables Aero as part of an emergency resource recovery (mainly for RAM though) so it's possible that it does do DirectX 9 just not fast enough for Windows to let it be enabled.

I haven't really found any compelling reason to leave Aero enabled, I was kind of hoping in addition to the smoke effects on the title bars that Windows would come with other options, like say a kaleidoscope option or even maybe some kind of distortion, like those old screensavers that were in Windows 98 that distorted the screen as the circle bounced around. Smoke is cool but it's not a very creative demonstration of what the system is really capable of...

[timew]

the onboard card thats in your laptop is a radeon mobility or something similar which are direct 9 compliant. All intel onboards are directx8 compliant as far as I know. Simply installing DirectX9 or 10 doesn't fix this because the features have to be supported by the card.

[timew]

I hope I eat my own words on DirectX10 :) It'd be nice if it supported DirectX8 hardware as its own.

[captainnem]

Well ... remember all the fanfare ATI and nVidia were touting when they released their fully programmable GPU's ? Surely all it would take is for ATI and nVidia, after the DX10 specification is released, to write a piece of code that gets loaded into the video card when the driver loads, and BAM the system now supports DirectX10 in hardware. I guess things like GPU clock and texture memory and pipelines and all that jazz need to still have enough processing and bandwidth to cover it, but given the simplicity of how Aero is running things, I would have figured that a Radeon 9200 would be more than adequate for it, even if it's not directly a DirectX 9 card. (probably a terrible example) I guess it wouldn't beat the raw processing of a completely hardware implemented solution, but I'd be very surprised if this is how things are running even now. I'm sure there are big chunks of processing done in software within the GPU that would be driver load and unloadable.

I don't know anywhere near enough about how video cards are implemented :/ but it makes sense to me that once you have "fully programmable GPU's" on a card that they could add hardware support to new software features. Or not, perhaps the performance hit really is severe, but these devices are amazingly quick even in old technology, I don't think Aero would be that intensive that it would cripple it.

A few people I've spoken to think that Aero is going to be released for XP anyway, which would totally negate the reason to upgrade to Vista given that .NET version 3 is available on XP too. I don't know how likely Microsoft are though to render their business future unnecessary, it certainly wouldn't be very characteristic of them.

They might make operating systems that crash, but running a business is something no one can say they don't know how to do!

[timew]