Vista and GMA 900

[Tostada]

I'm getting a laptop in the next couple weeks, and the ones I like most are some thin light Sonomas that are only available with integrated graphics. I'm really not concerned with gaming performance, but I'll be keeping the laptop for a few years, and I'll probably want to upgrade to Vista eventually.

I'm just concerned with all I've heard about Vista being much more graphically intensive. It doesn't look very complex to me, but I'm assuming it's something along the lines of the way OSX uses video memory so you really need dedicated graphics.

Has anybody tried the Vista beta with GMA 900 graphics? How bad is it?

 

[ND40oz]

I'm running it on an 865G board with intel extreme graphics, i don't think the beta has the new aero, there is really no way of telling right now.

 

[stash]

i don't think the beta has the new aero, there is really no way of telling right now.

Yes it does. If your hardware supports it, and you have an LDDM driver for your hardware, you will get Aero Glass. If not, it will scale back to a reduced Aero.

 

[stinger73]

I have vista beta with GMA 900 and a PM1.6 (no Aero, but runs fine), and another machine with ATI X600 128MB and PM 2.13 (which runs Aero). The word is that for all the visualizations MS reqires a external graphics solution and at least 64MB of VRAM (although they say the ATI integreted with 64MB Shared works fine).

I would strongly recommend you look for something with external graphics......

Just my 0.02 worth.

 

[ND40oz]

Originally posted by: STaSh

i don't think the beta has the new aero, there is really no way of telling right now.

Yes it does. If your hardware supports it, and you have an LDDM driver for your hardware, you will get Aero Glass. If not, it will scale back to a reduced Aero.

Shows what I know, I'll try it on a GMA 900 machine tomorrow as well as a GMA950 machine see what happens. Is there any difference between the laptop GMA900 and the 915G GMA900?

 

[drag]

There are a few differences between GMA900 series stuff. Not necisarially between laptop vs desktop...

There are differences in frequency and if your using DDR2 vs DDR, single channel vs dual channel memory could make a difference.

Probably not a huge difference, though. Otherwise the capabilities will be the same.


edit:

It would probably be a bad idea to run full-fledged Areo Glass in regular use on all but very fast machines.

Not because of the need for massive amounts of video memory, although that's a issue, but because the vast majority of applications will receive no hardware acceleration for their rendering.

GDI hardware acceleration is disabled when in full-fledged areo glass mode becuase of the need to have windows being rendered in off-screen buffers in order for the final composition (which obviously is were the directx-style 3d acceleration comes into effect).

And since almost all windows apps currently in existance use GDI (or GDI+ or whatever) you should see a increase in proccessor overhead. It probably won't be that noticable on machines with powerfull proccessors though.

 

[halfadder]

My guess is that Intel and Microsoft will be able to work out a way for the GMA900 graphics to support Aero Glass by the time Vista is in stores. I have been reading the reveiws of Apple's Intel version of Mac OS X and early developer tests show it has been doing Quartz Compositing and even some Core Image processing rather well... and that's on GMA900 + 3.6 GHz P4 2MB + dual channel 533 DDR2.

 

[bjc112]

Originally posted by: STaSh

i don't think the beta has the new aero, there is really no way of telling right now.

Yes it does. If your hardware supports it, and you have an LDDM driver for your hardware, you will get Aero Glass. If not, it will scale back to a reduced Aero.

Do you have any screenshots of Aero glass?

At this point, Vista doesn't look to exciting as they continue to cut back features..

 

[stash]

Do you have any screenshots of Aero glass?

There are numerous tech sites that have screenshots with glass enabled.

At this point, Vista doesn't look to exciting as they continue to cut back features..

'At this point' would be beta 1. And I'm not sure what you are referring to with continuing to cut back on features.

 

[mechBgon]

Vista looks exciting to me based on the departure from "Administrator-by-default" behavior in some areas. They're not going to hand the pistol to the newbie gun owner with a full clip of ammo in it anymore. And hopefully that signals the beginning of the end of stoOpid software that doesn't work right (or at all) unless it's being run with Admin privileges.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: halfadder
My guess is that Intel and Microsoft will be able to work out a way for the GMA900 graphics to support Aero Glass by the time Vista is in stores. I have been reading the reveiws of Apple's Intel version of Mac OS X and early developer tests show it has been doing Quartz Compositing and even some Core Image processing rather well... and that's on GMA900 + 3.6 GHz P4 2MB + dual channel 533 DDR2.

Previous presentations I've seen from Microsoft say that it will allow Areo Glass on machines that are autodetected by the system to be able to use it. It's based on a sliding scale of hardware capabilities and features.

Stuff like cpu speed, cpu class, memory aviable to system and memory on the video card.

Since the GMA has NO memory on the video card, then it probably won't let you do it by default. Probably could force it to do it.

Also keep in mind that comparing OS X to Windows isn't going to work out very well performance wise.

OS X's 'aqua' enviroment is actually very old. The beta was released to public in 2000. Which is fairly normal; Apple users tend to get modern usability technology well in advance of other operating systems...

But it's designed to run on quite old hardware. I worked with OS X 10.2 on a PowerMAC 500mhz cpu and 256 megs of RAM with Adobe photoshop and it worked perfectly fine. Much better then the Windows machines with much faster cpus and such.

Hell, I've run OS X with _NO_ hardware acceleration at all, and it ran well enough.

This is because OS X and it's enviroment is designed from the ground up to be this way. VERY little of OS 9 is in OS X.

Windows on the otherhand still has to deal with legacy code dating from Windows 95 era. All sorts of considurations for backward compatability and such. The Win32 API was never realy designed to do things like they are doing with Areo Glass and Windows is going to pay a penalty in terms of performance.

Now if you were using native Vista applications using the Avalon system would perform just as fast and as well as Cocoa and Carbon apps do.

Unfortunately there are no avalon applications yet. There isn't even avalon aviable yet, except some sample stuff for developers to play around with. And avalon won't be aviable for some time after Vista gets released.

Also keep in mind that the beta is NOT a good representation of what Vista will be like when it is finished.

Right now it's just some goober'd up Windows XP interface with a slight face lift. Some transpariences and some compositing effects.

It's not until Beta 2 until your going see anything realy resembling what the finished product UI will look like.

At least thats what Microsoft says.