One In Two PCs Won't Run Vista's Interface

ThinSkin writes "While integrated graphics seem to handle Windows XP and 2000 just fine, they won't be able to handle Vista's 3D 'Aero Glass' compositor, which will prevent roughly half of all PCs from running Microsoft's new OS. Performance class cards that can handle DirectX 9.0c are up for the challenge." From the article: "After years of delays and several feature revisions, one of Vista's main selling points is the Aero Glass interface. However, as Peddie notes, users already have the ability to start constructing a PC that should be Vista-ready before the OS even ships. Microsoft also said this week that it would reserve its Halo 2 videogame for Vista."

Comments

Not necessarily bad.

[DrEldarion]

I say this can be a good thing. We'll finally either:

A) Get some decent integrated graphics systems (or see NForce boards take off in popularity)
or
B) See big computer retailers putting at least adequate graphics cards into their base systems.

This will do wonders for the ability to play games on cheap laptops.

The people with older graphics systems that can't run Vista? Chances are most won't need to upgrade anyway, and XP-compatible consumer software won't be going anywhere for a long time. Sure, they won't be able to run Halo 2 PC, but hell, if they can't meet Vista specs, they sure as hell can't meet the game's specs.

Inaccurate Summary

[DaHat]

Not only is it inaccurate summary, it's pretty trollish too... sure running Aero Glass takes some horsepower, there is nothing preventing a user from turning it off and running it in a more 95/98/2000 style and not have the benefits or eye candy they could have if they had a more powerful system

Hell, go back to 2001, I remember knowing many people whose PC's ran awful slow when running XP in Fisher Price mode, so they'd revert to the classic look and things were fine until they had a slightly better PC a little later.

Same will happen here.

What does aeroglass DO?

[AmazingRuss]

All I have heard about aeroglass is that it makes the windows desktop look like the OSX desktop. Why does that take so much horsepower? I'm running OSX on an old Imac G3 450.

Why does the desktop requre more graphics calculations than a modern video game? Somebody please whack me with the cluebat.

How this kind of marketing might work

[AEton]

When you're faced with a hostile audience (e.g. Slashdot), it can be tricky to slip your PR messages past the filters. After all, you aren't AMD; you don't want to have your own Slashdot Vendors section to give you a straight feed to the PR bin, since you know that skeptical readers will just ignore your message.

So what you do instead is construct a message that seems threatening for about forty-five seconds -- just as long as an editor will review it in the pending articles queue: you say, hey, my new software product is going to have really stringent hardware requirements. Oh, the editors say, this is perfect! It's interesting, controversial, and definitely front page material.

What they don't see is the second touch: you subtly phrase the article so that the impression left on reader is not that your product is incompatible, but that it is exclusive. Oh, they think -- I have a high-end system! I've got to try out this Vista thing on it!

Suckers.

Re:Switch

[laffer1]

Hmm.. well pcs might go up in price now that they must include real video cards. Apple ships Radeon or nvidia cards in everything and have for years. No intel onboard POS cards. All macs can run games as a result even the low end laptops. Thats why people pay for macs. Price out a dell with a radeon or recent nvidia card in it and then compare apple's prices. Apple is VERY competative.

Its also true that you can get a dell desktop with monitor for 300-400 dollars and that a mac mini is 500 plus you need a monitor. However, the mac has a real video card in it too. You can't game on a 300 hundred dollar dell. Most don't even have agp or pciE slots to upgrade your onboard video and standard pci don't cut it anymore. Before you try to say macs aren't upgradable, my wife's powermac has a retail ati 9800 in it and it shipped with a geforce 4 mx 32mb AGP card.

Your argument is 5 years old. Steve jobs now wants to ship affordable computers and thats part of the intel switch.

Finally, if you are referring to home built pcs, must people don't do that. Sure slashdot readers can slap a computer together for a few hundred bucks thats quite nice, but my mom or cousin can't. Apple sells computers and if you compare dell, sony, gateway, lenovo (or whatever ibm pcs are), or hp i think you'll see they aren't cheap. Dell's gaming line is quite expensive in fact. You can even buy a powermac or well equipped iMac for Dell prices. Dell gaming or dell precision workstations are in the quality realm of apple powermacs.

Now lets see you build a core duo for less than apple with a 17 inch widescreen lcd display, remote control, radeon graphics, and other specs in a small form factor. 17 inch lcd displays are cheap, but not widescreen displays. Price DELL out on those.

Re:dont be evil

[MojoStan]

...I plan to squeeze every last drop of life out of XP Pro. That is, until M$ does evil things to force people to upgrade, like releasing Vista-specific software and dropping patches for XP altogether.

Microsoft will continue to provide security updates (part of "extended support") for Windows XP Pro for at least 7 years after Vista's release. So if Vista is released late this year, XP Pro will be under extended support until late 2013. (Note that XP Home doesn't get "extended support" and "mainstream support" ends 2 years after Vista's release.)

Since so many users (especially businesses) will continue to use XP Pro while it's still under "extended support," I'm sure third-party software will continue to be written for XP if many of the software company's customers are still using XP. Only Microsoft has an interest in shutting out a large number of existing XP users (so users will upgrade to Vista).

Re:Vista != Vista's 3D Interface

[Burning1]

Casual users rarely notice any difference between this OS, and that OS until marketing or minimum requirements kick in. The majority of people run the latest and greatest for the same reason they buy only new cars.

Um, compatibility with their software?

[Namarrgon]

Or are you suggesting Vista is forcing them to buy a new box and all-new software for everything they do? And to convert much of their data from their old software's format to that of whatever software might actually run on Vista? And to relearn an entirely new interface, new maintenance tricks etc? And to give up many games and other programs that aren't available on Vista at all? Coz that's what you'd have to do to switch to a Mac. You think the only difference between PCs and Macs is the interface?

Faced with such a choice, I think I'd just stick with the fully-functional system I already have. Luckily, there's no such issue anyway, as for 99% of Windows users, Vista doesn't require a new box to run at all.