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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.
Every new version of windows has beefed up the requirements, and I've always found them usable with less than they say.
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
Looks like it is going to be a booming year for ATI and NVIDIA when Vista is released
A: "wow, that's a sweet rig, where'd you get that?"
B: "It came with my purchase of Windows Vista."
It's kinda like those people that drive with huge-ass spoilers on their tiny cars. Did the car come with the spoiler or did the spoiler come with the car?
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
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.
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.
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.
We should be able to run this on our new 6.8Ghz 2TB HD 1TB RAM laptops!
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.
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
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...)
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!
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."
I'm typing this from my Vista beta install on a 3-year old Dell Dimension 4400, P4 1.7GHz, 512MB RAM and a Matrox P750 VGA card. Hardly a high-end PC these days. Even this first beta, it's been running well so far, does a lot better on suspend/resume than XP did for me and doesn't seem sluggish. Sure you'll be able to get more bells and whistles up and running on faster hardware, but I have no complaints this far..
Before you flame me for being a MS zealot, the Vista machine is next to my Slackware 10.1 box and my really old Pentium 166 that is installing SCO OpenServer 5.0.2 as I type this. Computers are fun, regardless of the OS they run..
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
SATA NCQ does *NOT* give SCSI performance.
This is not to say it's not a hell of a lot more useful than not being able to do disconnected writes at all, but pre-insertion of write barriers instead of post insertion via scheduling is really a poor-man's version of I/O concurrency.
Unless you go out of your way to do a FUA (Force Unit Access), on SATA, there is no guarantee that write data has been committed to stable storage, rather than just cache.
In SCSI tagged command queueing, you can be guaranteed that the write has been committed to stable storage before the write is acknowledges as completed (yes, it's optional to turn this off in mode page 2, but only idiots do it).
The upshot of this is that the OS must issue FUA on writes and stall the pipeline for other writes that don't require a commitment to stable storage (e.g. FUA for metadata and journalling, no-FUA for other data).
This is (effectively) the difference between DOW (Delayed Ordered Writes) and SU (Soft Updates), which is what makes SU so much more effective than DOW.
Further, it means that the OS can't use the acknowledgement to schedule future operations on the disk, without knowing ahead of time the FUA is necessary for a given write.
The issue here is that if I'm, for example, updating the contents in a single directory entry block on disk in two different processes, instead of deciding to delay the second update until I know the first one has completed (via the acknowledgement), I must issue the first one as an FUA command, and then the second one as an FUA command, which adds latency to my pipeline.
"Mr. SATA, I've worked with Mr. SCSI, and you're no Mr. SCSI".
-- Terry
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?
I'm convinced I know the real reason MS needs you to have spiffy video card. We've all pissed clippy off by making fun of him... Now we're gonna log into windows and BAM! 3D clippy. And if he finds open office icons on your desktop hes gonna kick them around like soccer balls so Joe6Pack can't use it... thats my conspiracy theory of the day....
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.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....