Bulky System Requirements for Windows Vista

unsurreal writes ""A Tech Strategist within Microsoft, Nigel Page, has gone on record to discuss the hardware requirements for Windows Vista, due out next Christmas." The next year is going to be an interesting one as hardware vendors smile towards the shocking new recommended hardware needed for the next generation Windows operating system." From the article: "Graphics: Vista has changed from using the CPU to display bitmaps on the screen to using the GPU to render vectors. This means the entire display model in Vista has changed. To render the screen in the GPU requires an awful lot of memory to do optimally - 256MB is a happy medium, but you'll actually see benefit from more. Microsoft believes that you're going to see the amount of video memory being shipped on cards hurtle up when Vista ships." Coverage available at Tom's Hardware as well, with a semi-transcript at Tech Ed.

Comments

Heard this before

[_pi-away]

Every new version of windows has beefed up the requirements, and I've always found them usable with less than they say.

Re:Heard this before

[Jazzer_Techie]

Windows will certainly be usable with less. Most of the GUI "eye-candy" in XP fails to be useful, not to mention less than aesthetically pleasing. The first thing that I do when I reinstall Windows (after patching it all up an installing Firefox) is to set it back to the Windows Classic theme. All of the eye candy inflates the sys reqs. I can't see myself sticking with the new Vista GUI either.

Buy NVIDIA and ATI stock

[Boap]

Looks like it is going to be a booming year for ATI and NVIDIA when Vista is released

256MB of video memory?

[Paralizer]

Give me a break! It's an operating system, what technicial leaps must it render that requires so much memory? I can run Doom3 at 1024x768 at pretty high quality with my 128MB card without a problem, yet to render a few windows and a start bar I need twice that?

Eye-candy doesn't result in functionality Microsoft... shift your attention towards usability.

Thanks, Bill!

[appleLaserWriter]

If a basic Windows box requires 256 MB of video RAM to run, then Macintosh OS X on x86 will definitely be the less expensive PC.

Ho-hum

[Brunellus]

We're covering this as if most users were going to upgrade from XP to Vista, and will be thus compelled to shell out big bucks for new graphics cards, ram, disks, etc for their current computers just to run the new OS.

This is, of course, not the case. Most users who cannot upgrade will march blithely on with the OS they already have. I'm writing from work, where we're still using Windows 2000. The computer next to me is an ancient Pentium 133--and it runs Win95.

Home users will encounter Vista when they decide to buy a brand new computer, and from that perspective, they'll have gotten a shiny new OS with their shiny new hardware. Nobody will see the cost of the OS and the cost of the hardware to run it as separate things.

vectorized icons need 256MB?

[mistermark]

Hmmmz, my SGI Indy didn't need 256MB of videomemory to have vectorized icons... somehow I get the feeling Vista isn't the most efficiently programmed software/OS we've seen... ;-)

(and the Indy *did* ship with a journaling filesystem... XFS...)

Re:Almost admissable proof of monopoly.

[KillShill]

hardly.

have you seen current 600 dollar pcs?

they far outclass the 600 dollar mac mini and those run tiger.

by the time vista ships, 600 bucks will buy you a lot more power than you "need" to run vista.

if you turn off the eye-candy , it'll run as well as xp does today.

you have it wrong, hardware requirements are not a good reason not to get vista. there are much better reasons not to get it, like the massive DRM and financially supporting ms, which is as good reason as any.

Why so much VRAM for GPU-driven display?

[Logic Bomb]

Mac OS X 10.4 is capable of rendering the entire interface using the GPU (they call it Quartz Extreme). The system delivers some incredibly cool visual effects (see Core Image), and it does it on systems with as little as 64 MB of VRAM on the graphics card. So what the hell is Vista going to do where 256 will be optimal?

Re:Almost admissable proof of monopoly.

[HTTP Error 403 403.9]

if you turn off the eye-candy , it'll run as well as xp does today.

Vista is nearly all eye-candy, if you strip off the eye-candy, all you have is XP with staggering DRM.

Re:Almost admissable proof of monopoly.

[Tim C]

Hang on.

However, since 64-bit is handling data chunks that are double the size, you'll need double the memory, hence the 2GB.

64bit data is double the size of 32bit data? Just installing a 64bit version of an OS doubles your RAM requirements compared to the 32bit version?

Since when?

Insightful?

[p3d0]

Every pointer in every data structure now requires twice as much memory. I can't say for all programs, but in the Java world (where I work), about half of memory typically contains pointers. Therefore you expect to see a 50% increase in memory consumption.

CPU stacks now have 8-byte entries, so they are pretty much always twice as big.

AMD64 code is quite a bit bigger than IA32 code. Most estimates say 15%.

None of these double your memory requirements, but it's probably easier for them to prereq 2GB of ram than 1.4GB.