Interesting article on Vista

[Topher]

It runs as smooth as silk, with browsers, a media player, and gaim running, still 200MB of RAM free and the swap unused. Aero's requirements are a gig of RAM and 128MB of video memory. But why? Unless it has some hidden feature that I'm not aware of like saving my soul, the requirements are above what they should be. Vista is a beast of an operating system, and its inefficiency is a valid complaint regardless of its requirements.

You're leaving out a couple of crucial details. One, what is your screen resolution? Two, what's the average window size of your application?

Old display systems can get away with one video buffer because they just draw everything into that at once, each window has an update rectangle that it fills. With a 3D system like Aero or Mac, each window's texture must be stored in memory, otherwise you couldn't get those nice 3D window rearranging effects. It's also much quicker and more robust for drawing. Ever move a window over a frozen application and see that window's ghost remain on the other window? The problem is eliminated with 3D window managing like this.

So, a 1600x1200 desktop at 32-bits takes a little more than 7 megabytes of video ram. Add on 3 maximized windows and you've already reached the limit of your 32 megabyte video card.

128 megatbyte card allows for about 18 windows. Even this sounds small to me, but it's not Vista's fault at all, it's how much space the raw data takes up.

[Jeff250]

A lot of people also forget that vista isnt just a visual upgrade, its a new kernal.

It's not an entirely new kernel, just an updated (XP) kernel, unless this is what you meant, but then every version of Windows has a new kernel.

as to aero, its not just the transparency, each window is an individually rendered 3D-object, something Mac hasnt done. and having used both Mac and Vista on this PC, I can say mac looks like ***** compared to aero, to each his own i guess.

Did you read the links I posted in my first post? Mac and Linux already support this. The first link specifically talked about Mac's "Quartz" compositing manager rendering windows as offscreen OpenGL textures, and the second showed all sorts of pretty Linux things. Now, does either platform have that EXACT same alt-tab effect where they position the windows at an angle? No, but that isn't to be expected. I don't know what kind of switcher Mac uses, but compiz displays miniature, realtime displays of open windows that can be scrolled through by pressing tab, which isn't the same effect, but demonstrates the use of compositing and OpenGL texturing. If I recall correctly, Mac has a similar thing were you hold your pointer over something, you get a realtime preview of the window too, but don't hold me to it.

So, a 1600x1200 desktop at 32-bits takes a little more than 7 megabytes of video ram. Add on 3 maximized windows and you've already reached the limit of your 32 megabyte video card.

I have to retract that--it's currently set to 64MB, although it's been set to 32MB in the past to allow for more RAM. I normally work at 1280x800x24 with the default four virtual desktops enabled. Just for the purposes of trying to max out video memory, I even tried upping the ante to (the seeming max of) ten virtual desktops enabled:

...with a buttload of applications:

but still fully functional. It's hard to tell from the picture, but the compiz "cube" actually has ten sides now. I don't know what more I can do to try to fill up the video memory.

[Immortal Lobster]

Vista is NT 6.x, not, 5 its a shiney new kernal

and I have mac installed on this PC as well, the switchers and windows are not 3D, theyre all quite 2D looking, even when animated (shrink, expand) looks like it takes a screenshot and warps a jpeg around. I never found a realtime preview in it. and Ill agree, Linux has lots of potential when it comes don to it, but I dont want to spend 5 hours installing it followed by 2 days etting up all the minute details. No, Id rather spend 40minutes installing Vista, and 3 minutes locking it down, followed by two minutes of tweaking

[Krom]

Guess I'm safe since my last two video cards are both 256 MB cards.

[DCrazy]

Don't forget Jeff that Xgl sits on top of Mesa, so at some point it has the ability to store data in system RAM.

I actually just ditched Xgl because it was interfering with Wine... the gnome-window-decorator refused to decorate Wine-created windows, or the Wine virtual desktop if it was enabled. Oh well, not missing it much.

[Immortal Lobster]

Aero also uses system Ram, as well as USB memory sticks. It will use any memory device plugged in via USB for system cache, swapfile, as well as Aero. so its not all reliant on VRAM. my roomates running Vista with Aero on his Athlon XP 2100+ and GeForceFX 5200 64MB card, there is no discernable difference between the functionality of Aero on his PC compared to my PC(Opteron 165 and GeForce7800GT 256MB) so Aero seems to scale well. He's going to install it on his laptop sometime this week, which has 32MB of vram, if that works Ill hold Aero with even greater regard. but its already high up on my list.

[Jeff250]

Vista is NT 6.x, not, 5 its a shiney new kernal

If that's your definition of shiney new kernel.

as well as USB memory sticks.

You're forgetting that anything stored on the USB stick also has to be mirrored on the hard drive's swap file. Plugging in a USB stick does nothing to increase the available virtual memory to the system. The whole premise behind it is that some reads are faster off of a USB stick than a hard drive. This doesn't change the fact that all data has to be written to both though in case Mr. USB stick goes bye-bye. Of course, many hard drives have faster transfer speed than even what a USB 2.0 port can put out, much less what is plugged into it. Supposedly a USB stick is still better for small, random IO transactions, so it will be used for those, and then fallback to the hard drive for larger transactions. Of course, when all of the overhead and encryption (to prevent people from yanking your paged data from your PC) is factored in, it will be interesting to see if it's even noticably faster with the small, random ones.

See here for more info.

[Topher]

Another interesting feature is support for \"ReadyDrive\". These are hybrid hard drives that have a certain amount of flash ram, writing to disk is then much faster since the disk doesn't have to seek all the time (I believe this is because it doesn't have to flush the flash like it does cache RAM since the flash will persist even on power off). Vista can also use this to increase speed when returning from sleep mode.

Vista has a lot of new features, some I'm really looking forward to like RDP 6.0 and transacted NTFS. I have Beta2 on a home machine and per-application volume is very (very) nice.

I can't vouch for what's in the Wikipedia article, but it's a pretty good list of what will probably be in Vista:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_n ... dows_Vista

[Immortal Lobster]

Yeah, my roomate is using a 512 USB drive on his PC, helped it out tremendously, and no, it doesnt mirror it on the HDD, the HDDs are usually most often tuned off. right now, all 3 of my drives are off, no spining, no seeking, no writing, they are all powered down, Im running strictly from RAM, and its quiet. I plan on buying a 512MB stick tomorrowm why, becuase Aero will store information to a flash drive instead/coupled with vram, which helps ease the load on the video card some.Vista will also use a flash drive in a similar form as XPs prefetch, so faster startup/shutdown. theres a lot of new shiney stuff to vista and its not just aero.

[Jeff250]

and no, it doesnt mirror it on the HDD

Please, for once fully read my posts and the links that I post before you try to contradict me. As much as I trust your anecdotal evidence, the MSDN blog that I linked to says quite plainly and matter-of-factly that the exact OPPOSITE is true.

and I have mac installed on this PC as well, the switchers and windows are not 3D, theyre all quite 2D looking

This doesn't change the fact that they're initially rendered offscreen and composited as OpenGL textures, which is essentially what Vista does too (except scratch out OpenGL and write in DirectX). Once you've gotten this far, you can do a lot of neat things with the textures, including Vista's alt-tab. But neither Mac nor Vista have a 3d window environment in a true sense. If you're interested in something like that, cross your fingers for Looking Glass.

[Immortal Lobster]

I trust blogs a lot less then i trust persoal experience. Windows will run, reading and writing all the time to a USB drive, with the HDDs powered down. if what the blog said were true, then the above wouldnt happen as it would need to have have the HDDs running in order to cache those files, but on 3 PCs Ive used vista on as of yet, the HDDs are powered down, fully, no spinning, no vibrations, theyre just off. the memory, and or USB drives are used for cache, and access. Im basing it off of actual expierience, not some blog.

as to LookingGlass, that does look cool, but thats to much, way to much.

[Topher]

I trust blogs a lot less then i trust persoal experience. Windows will run, reading and writing all the time to a USB drive, with the HDDs powered down.

A USB harddrive is different than a USB flash drive. If you're talking about ReadyBoost, then the link Jeff pointed to is probably the best resource about it so far. ReadyBoost uses the USB flash drive to cache applications you've used recently and when you run them again it tries to pull them from there first. I hear (but don't quote me on this) it's even smart enough to analyze what time of day you run certain applications and cache them accordingly.

It, however, is not an extension to RAM and data can't be written to it that is not written to the harddrive as well, otherwise you could pull the stick and you'd have data loss.

[Xamindar]

Windows will run, reading and writing all the time to a USB drive, with the HDDs powered down. if what the blog said were true, then the above wouldnt happen as it would need to have have the HDDs running in order to cache those files, but on 3 PCs Ive used vista on as of yet, the HDDs are powered down, fully, no spinning, no vibrations, theyre just off. the memory, and or USB drives are used for cache, and access. Im basing it off of actual expierience, not some blog.

You're kidding right? Using USB drives as swap? I must have missed something. Not only will that kill your flash drive faster but flash and USB are far too slow to allow that.

[Immortal Lobster]

I mean flash drives, and my roomates PC is definetly treating it as swap/temporary cache. it does add a boost to his overall performance as well. Im gonna buy a 20 dollar cheap stick in a few, plug it in and play with it. and a HDD will die long before a flash drive will die, those limited read/write cyce claims are pretty much bogus.

[edit]Plugged in a new flash drive, heres what it does. It does se it for cache, superfetch cache, and temp folder baclups. it is indeed in constant access, little blinking light might require some tape soon.

after plugging in the drive
Setup
Result