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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.
For any other company sysreqs this high with such a small increase in functionality would be suicide.
Blizzard could make an operating system that had lower sysreqs and decent graphics capabilities. And people would love it for saying, "Zug Zug."
Hopefully it's a nail in their home-desktop coffins that suddenly you can't put their OS on a machine that costs 600$, but somehow I doubt it. Xbox 360 for what most people currently use a home PC for, Vista for everything else.
My little site.
Of course the requirements are going to be bulky by mid 2005 standards. Vista is due in 2006/7 and will reflect the mid to high end computer design for late 2006.
Also, these seem to be optimal, not minimum requirements, and from the article "minimum system requirements for Windows Vista will not be known until summer 2006 at the earliest." So, I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate that your average system today will work fine with Vista, but you won't have all the bells and whistles.
Finally, the '512 MByte is "heaps" for a 32-bit system. For a 64-bit system, however, "you're going to want 2 gigs of DDR3 RAM."' is off. If you are happy with 512, you'll be happy with 1GB. If you play lots of games, you most likely have 1GB now and you'll be happy with 2gb. And if you play EverQuest 2, you'll be happy with about 20gb, but it will still skip in places and you can't use the ultra-high resolution.
My company has been on a gradual migration away from Microsoft products. We haven't made any aggressive step as of yet -- our desktops are mostly WinXP. Our servers are Linux and Novell with the occasional utility server running some form of MS Windows or another. We are testing Novell Linux Desktop but we aren't even close to a deployment plan yet.
But the capital expenses associated with this "upgrade" is needless and ridiculous even if we weren't planning to migrate to Linux.
Three things that I can see happening:
1)GNU/Linux goes mainstream faster
2)Macs go mainstream
3)Both 1+2
I am betting on it being released when the DOJ restrictions are lifted - November 2007
MS will never play fair, why should they start now (even though they are required to by law).
What's the deal here? Are they -trying- to shoot themselves in the foot?
Businesses already have almost -no- incentive to switch to Vista. Now, instead of just buying expensive licences, they have to upgrade the graphics cards on their vanilla work PCs??
Has someone at MS gone patently nuts?
Yes, I know you will say "Microsoft will pull support for XP, and thus force everyone to upgrade." Maybe. But I think there will be backlash here.
And if you think that Vista is going to be exclusively for consumers, please tell me how Dell will provide $400 dollar machines with such beefy video cards!! It defies logic!
This is madness! Madness I say!
It's not what you know, or even who you know- It's how many people recognize your damn
I could argue that 256mb cards will be a dime a dozen in 15 months, but all I have to say is:
256mb of vram should be enough for anyone.
Talk to me in 10 years and tell me then if you think that thats stupid.
I am no Microsoft lover but I have to speak out here. Nigel Page originally said it would "work best" under that rather steep hardware configuration, any OS "should" work best under that configuration.
As of the beta 1, the unoptimized version works kick ass on an 1800XP, 512MB DDR & Radeon 9700. Unless you want to use crap like "Aero Glass" you won't need a high end vid card. Personally speaking, I'm still worried about the DRM monitor requirements and I am also a bit uninterested since so many features (i.e. anything I really cared about as a windork) were dropped from the upcoming release.
There couldn't be a larger piece of disinformation circulating the net right now.
crazy dynamite monkey
There just isn't enough new in Longhorn/Vista to justify the buy. Where's the return on investment here? Why buy a new computer for everybody in your call center? Hello?
There's nothing wrong with rendering the entire user interface in the GPU. Softimage was doing that under NT 4 in 1997, using OpenGL. It was clunky back then, but it's worked fine for years. Multiple windows tend to run slowly in OpenGL on Windows, but that's because of a common bug that allows only one window to update per refresh. Buffer swapping needs to be better worked out for the multiple window case. But all of this requires relatively minor improvements.
If they think they can strong arm me into purchasing some DRM monitor they are absolutely off their rocker.
Now slashdotters, it is our mission to raise the awareness on these HDCP monitors. They are the new Palladium, the new NGSCB, the new (circuit city) divx.
I am feeling the red mist of rage!
Macintosh will be the viable "store bought" rig to recommend friends and relatives purchase. And for use, we will need to get Linux working with HD-DVD and Blu-ray in short order!
They want the Aero rendering to be considered fast and snappy. And, oh, it will possibly be so, but only on the right hardware. If they put the official requirements too low, it would just be said that the new interface is so full of eyecandy that it can't perform.
What's really interesting here is what they manage to pull of on laptops, together with ATI and Nvidia. Will the power management for graphics chips make sense, even when 3D mode doesn't equal "battery sucking gaming mode"? The (public) slides from Microsoft even from the very first mentioning of Longhorn's 3D UI stressed this aspect. It will be interesting to see the solution. If a Mactel box will provide a sleek UI with a charge keeping the machine powered for twice as long, that'll be a very real selling point.
When the quality and quantity of supply stabilizes to exactly meet demand, something "terrible" happens. Manufacturers can compete on only 1 "feature": price. The price plummets, and the profit per machine is about $10.00.
Along comes Microsoft with a special deal (for the manufacturers): We will artificially build demand for more and newer hardware into the next operating system, and you manufacturers increase the kickback, per system, to $150 for the coffers of Microsoft.
Hurl chunks is more like it when I see the bill.
However, since 64-bit is handling data chunks that are double the size, you'll need double the memory, hence the 2GB.
You've got to be kidding with this statement. Does this person even understand the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit processors? I don't think so.
NCQ allows for out of order completions - that is, if Vista needs tasks 1,2,3,4 and 5 done, it can do them in the order 2,5,3,4,1
Excuse me, but Vista isn't the one doing the reordering of hard drive accesses. NCQ is done in the controller and drive itself.
NCQ is supported on SATA2 drives
And selected SATA-1 drives.
AGP is 'not optimal' for Vista. Because of the fact that graphics cards may have to utilise main system memory for some rendering tasks, a fast, bi-direction bus is needed - that's PCI express.
Will there be an AGP system left that can meet the rest of the Vista requirements? And I thought AGP had an option to use system memory in the specification as well.
no current TFT monitor out there is going to support high definition playback in Vista.
What if they release Vista, and nobody bought? If the consumers finally said We've had enough of this sh|t?
This isn't really Microsoft's fault - HDCP is something that content makers, in their eternal wisdom, have decided is necessary to stop us all watching pirated movies.
Oh yes it is Microsoft's fault. Without Microsoft enabling this the whole concept would be DOA. And Trusted Computing isn't even mentioned.
Tell me again, please. What is the compelling reason to upgrade to Vista?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
No, not really. Not me anyway...I have managed to get Panther to run on a '99 iBook with a 300 MHz G3 and a measly 164M RAM, by turning off the window minimization "Genie Effect" candy, by setting the Desktop changing feature to change wallpaper every day, as opposed to every five seconds, etc.
One may ask "why use OS X on a machine that was never meant to run it?" This is Slashdot, right?
Pinky, are you thinking what I'm thinking?
If the O/S uses 256 MB of graphic RAM how much of that will get released by the O/S when I want to run a really high resolution game?
HL 2 looked fairly good on 128 MB (what I have now). I wonder if they are purposely bloating the req speculatively or if this is the ideal just to run the O/S. *shudder*
Oh and who wants to bet on the number of companies that will buy these insane-o high powered systems to run Vista because XP won't be supported at that point. JOY!
I'm not even going to get into the rest "Where's my HDCP?"... trust me I won't ask that I'll be saying "Where is my capability to fairly copy works that I own!"
Oops, how did this get here?
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I once had a colleague who was training to get an MCSE. Out of curiosity I took a look at the introduction course, at the very begining they were bragging about how Windows NT consisted of 50 gazillion-something lines of code.
Now, most Slashdotters would read that and say:
"bloated software."
The average non-techie computer user will think:
"wow!"
When seeing these silly requirements for Vista (oh, what a stupid stupid stupid name!), most Slashdotters are thinking:
"Incompetent idiots."
The average non-techie computer user will think:
"wow!"
No, I'm running the latest available to beta testers (which I've been since 1994 or so), build 5112, downloaded strait from Redmond.
Vista will make better use of the GPU if that GPU supports the functions requested by Vista. If you use an older card like my Matrox it uses the same old technology as XP. In fact I'm running with the Matrox XP drivers, as Vista doesn't recognise the card by itself. Dual screen DVI setup with two Neovo X17 TFT's running at 1280x1024 each. Works like a charm..
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
I can run Doom3 at 1024x768 at pretty high quality with my 128MB card
Windows 95 had the same requirements of Quake 1. Need to generalize this??!
gtkaml.org
2GB is the ideal configuration for 64-bit Vista, we're told. Vista 32-bit will work ideally at 1GB, and minimum 512. However, since 64-bit is handling data chunks that are double the size, you'll need double the memory, hence the 2GB.
Does this make sense to anyone? It sounds like he thinks the memory footprint of all applications will double just because the address size has. Or perhaps this is just what they're going to tell users when the next version of MS Word occupies 200 megs of RAM.
Just think! Every computer around the world (home, work, laptops, and "Mactells" might as well ship with the same hardware specs) will be a sweet game machine. Think of the kind of LAN traffic corporations will see now.
At least it won't be surfing the web that will kill productivity.
lexbaby
"Be Brave, Be Loyal, Be True." -- Hawkeye Pierce
Well.. interestingly, yeah, it is.
One reason why - how is game performance going to be affected by the O/S requiring 256M of the GPU memory? How much does it release when you launch D3? How much *more* vid ram would you have by running linux?
Maybe it's a step for linux to be "the" viable gaming product. If you're seeing a 30fps increase just because you're using a different O/S, I think a lot of gamers will take a second look (of course it's the chicken and egg problem still)
Minumum Requirements: Needed to get the thing installed.
Recommended Requirements: Needed to get the thing working.
~The TwoTailedFox posts again....
Frustration and outrage over the system requirements aside, it is an incredibly good thing that the rendering system is moving from bitmap to vector. That is where we should be going, that is where we should have been years ago. It is dispicable that setting the DPI of your Windows system to its true value makes half the system text illegible and ugly. It is pathetic that KDE can handle truly high-resolution displays completely and more cleanly than an OS that costs $200+. And it is asinine that in 2005, I cannot smoothly scale my entire display based on how far my nose is from my screen.
(Had I my way, no web page would ever, ever be allowed to use "pixels" for anything. Period. No exceptions.)