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4 GB May Be Vista's RAM Sweet Spot
jcatcw writes "David Short, an IBM consultant who works in the Global Services Division and has been beta testing Vista for two years, says users should consider 4GB of RAM if they really want optimum Vista performance. With Vista's minimum requirement of 512MB of RAM, Vista will deliver performance that's 'sub-XP,' he says. (Dell and others recommend 2GB.) One reason: SuperFetch, which fetches applications and data, and feeds them into RAM to make them accessible more quickly. More RAM means more caching."
I gotta disagree. I just used Vista last night for the first time on my GF's new laptop with 1 gig RAM, and it was just fine. Even with the souped up interface, it seemed snappy. I was a bit worried from all of this kind of anti-hype hype, but it was just fine. I'd be happy using it with 1 gig RAM. I'd say that it was a smidgen slower than XP would be, but then again, I didn't try turning off the super-slick Apple-esqe "Aero" interface, either (she likes it, I still use Windows Classic on all of my XP boxes).
I don't respond to AC's.
If I remember correctly, the sweet spot for xp was 1 gig, meaning people got more bang for their buck upgrading the processor.
If vista scales all the way to 4, then we're looking at a windows market that will be very similar to the mac market, where upgrading the video card and ram will get you more bang for your buck than replacing the processor.
this will mean a slowdown in intel sales (and amd)
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
People do the same things with their computers today as they did 15 (even 20) years ago: play games, print, e-mail, read, write, collect media. While there is an argument to be made that OSD, due to higher resolutions and 3D algorithms, and networking have become more complex there simply is no efficient reason why the size of the codebase and the memory footprint has increased as much as it has.
There is a good reason: people remain employed.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
In the bad old days, CPUs were very slow. Programming in assembly language was essential for a 6502. The user interface was ugly ASCII text. Most of the CPU cycles were expended for the core part of the application. The "core part" might be recalculating the entries in the cells of VisiCalc.
On 512MB Vista runs perfectly fine, having automatically turned off the UI bells and whistles and throttled back some of its services. In my experience 1GB is the sweet spot, which is how much I have on my Dev box.
Turn off aero. Turn on "Windows Classic" desktop theme. You're good to go with 1GB of memory. Microsoft could tell you the same thing, but then the best features that they offer in this bloated release won't even be used (and it is these features MS is stressing based on print ads and commercials).
MS knows shineys sell software to Joe Sixpack, so they don't mind the extra memory it takes to run them all the time. However, I'd don't think vista needs 4 gigs of memory to run snappy with all the goodies turned off.
I got nothin'
People do the same things with their computers today as they did 15 (even 20) years ago: play games, print, e-mail, read, write, collect media.
That is true inclusively but not exclusively. 15 (or 20) years ago people used PCs for mostly office applications and home computers for games and light word processing. Geeks and tech-types used computers for programming: either work-enhancing or hobbyist programming (often both).
Interfacing with other computer users in real time through BBS systems and modems was just beginning to catch on. E-mail outside defense and academic environments was all but unknown.
A real computer revolution happened with the widespread inexpensive introduction of 100+ MHz Pentium and compatable processors that enabled the rise of MP3 audio file-sharing and CD ripping. That, along with photo-quality graphics and large hard-disks (bigger than anyone's collection application programs and data), led to the use of PCs as media-centers as we now use them. That happened about ten years ago with the introduction of Napster.
The multi-gigahertz machines (and the DeCSS program) enabled the video and movie PC revolution that we have today. The communications revolution (VoIP, Skype) is also a direct result of sub-$500 multi-gigahertz boxes.
The next revolution will be near-photographic quality interactive games using synthetic video and real-time voice-to-voice language translation.
What is interesting to watch is the destruction of various industries with each phase of this continuing PC revolution. Word processing wiped out the typewriter industry. (ever meet anyone under 21 who has ever used one?) The spreadsheet destroyed the specialized mechanical calculator. AutoCAD destroyed paper drafting. MP3 file sharing is currently destroying the recorded music industry (sales of CDs down 50% from 1997, according to Rolling Stone). Photo-quality video in interactive games will destroy the television industry. iPhones and Skype will destroy the global telecommunications companies.
What fun!!!
>...Vista's just using the extra RAM to cache frequently used apps, documents, etc., and it'll automatically be freed up if any application requests it...
Will it? Given past MS dirty tricks, how many layers of tinfoil are really required to suspect that Vista is set up to give third-party apps short shrift when it comes to RAM so that they're more likely to thrash?
What I think is needed is a way to see what ram is used by superfetch and maybe even for what. If it's freed up immediately when another application requests it, then it's really shouldn't be considered used in the scheme of things. Sure the ram space is filled but its not used at that moment. I also am surprised by how many people are fooled by this and are jumping to a conclusion that Vista needs absurd memory to run. I read less to tech stories these days and focus more on the comments where people break the real info.
Let's see, 95's "sweet spot" was what, 32 Mb? Windows '98 was 64, Win2K did well in 256, XP likes 512+ and Vista really wants four gigabytes? Ouch. Of course, when you factor in how much less the cost per bit of memory and hard disk is compared to a decade ago, it's not too incredible ... but still.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Turn off aero. Turn on "Windows Classic" desktop theme. You're good to go with 1GB of memory. Microsoft could tell you the same thing, but then the best features that they offer in this bloated release won't even be used (and it is these features MS is stressing based on print ads and commercials).
Even with 1GB you are good with AERO, as Vista only uses a fraction of system RAM for the AERO effects, since it intelligently co-shares system and video RAM.
For example, Aero is consuming only 12Mb of system RAM on the computer I am typing this on at the moment. I also have an animated wallpaper (video) and this window is partially transparent so I can see my applications behind it.
Vista does NOT double buffer like OSX, so there is not this massive overhead for RAM by using the AERO interface like there is in OSX to get tear free applicaiton drawing.
People forget that turning off Aero and effectively the DWM, reduces ALL application performance on Vista.
This is because it disables the acceleration drawing in hardware at the GDI/WPF level, and also pushes application redrawing back to the applications like WindowsXP.
So you not only get a worse 'visual' experience with it off, as you get tearing and extra redrawing with the composer turned off, you also get a massive performance reduction as this tearing and redrawing forces the application to consume CPU cycles to redraw when you do anything, just as Windows XP did.
When you turn off Aero you lose the composer and some of the 3D GPU acceleration of Vector and Bitmap drawing functions of the core graphics subsystem that assist the appliation in drawing the interface before it even gets to the composer.
And even though Vista gets the 'effect' of double buffering Window textures, it doesn't technically double buffer them, so the RAM overhead to do all this is quite minimal as the GPU RAM is used instead of both System and GPU RAM being used as in OSX.
See Vista's driver model gives it some cool tricks, and this is just one side effect. And since the driver model allows Vista to draw directly to the screen from GPU or System RAM without having to shove the System RAM image into the GPU before drawing like OSX does, you don't have to double store images in the composer.
So Vista can use system or GPU RAM intelligently and draw directly to the screen from either memory pool. Which is also why AGP and PCI/e are needed for the Aero interface in Vista.
So even with 1GB of RAM, don't be so quick to turn off Aero.
In fact several 3D games run faster with Aero enabled,(even on 1GB systems) because if you only have 128MB of Video RAM, and the game wants more for textures, Vista will intelligently use free System RAM to hold the less performance intensive textures. And since the application via the Vista WDDM sees the GPU and Vista allocated System RAM for textures as the same it can draw or use them directly as if your Video card had 512mb of GPU RAM instead of 128MB.
So if your video card lacks the GPU RAM for the 'high quality' textures in your game, leave Aero on and you can shove the texture quality in the game up beyond what your card would normally be capable of handling.
Also with respect to how the OpenGL driver is made by ATI or NVidia, Vista can even do this for OpenGL applications as well.
Good luck and don't be so quick to turn off Aero, you might be surprised how much performance it adds to the system, even with 1GB of RAM.
(Our techs even leave it enabld on 512mb systems as it still gives more of a performance boost than the 8-20mb of RAM it consumes on average.)
Too bad we aren't doing exponetially better things with these boxes...
I was thinking the same thing, how much more than eye candy has every release been since 95. Obviously the switch to the NT kernel was big but really the biggest difference in each release has been eye candy. Can you imagine how fast win 95 would run on an AMD Athlon 64 6000+ with a gig of ram.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Had a friend who tried to buy a Dell box today. They wouldn't sell it to him with XP on it; only Vista. I can only imagine what kind of deals Dell and MSFT have cut...
So, extrapolating your argument to the next level -- Are you advocating that we stop producing processors with L1 and L2 cache since they sometimes have cache misses?
Put identity in the browser.
The first Macintosh, the Apple IIgs, the Atari ST series, Amigas all had graphical user interfaces more than twenty years ago; my calculator (Ti89) has more processing power than all of these (and the same CPU as most of these, except the IIgs - a Motorola 68000). So the presence of a GUI can't really explain the bloatiness of today's software.
Try again.
I think that you can actually use the license to downgrade to XP Pro - I read it somewhere... :-s
That sounds so much like what people have been saying about *nix systems for years.
Which is exactly what I was thinking... and I can't help but think in response: Is this really the first Microsoft OS to have built-in file caching? I mean, really? I guess I just assumed that around the same time Windows got big-boy OS features like memory protection that they also got file caching. I'm still assuming I'm not understanding, because it seems ridiculous.
The enemies of Democracy are
> The whole point of on-board RAM is that its bandwidth is much, much wider then that of even the PCI/e bus.
:)
As far as _bandwidth_ goes, actually only a bit wider even with the fastest RAM setups currently available in consumer systems.
PCIe 16x = 8 GB/sec
Dual-channel DDR2-800 = ~ 12 GB/sec
Of course, with dual independent 16x PCIe lanes and an SLI or Crossfire GPU setup, you'd have 16 GB/sec bandwidth to graphics ram. Moreover, the PCIe bus is full duplex, meaning it can read and write at the same time. The memory bus (unless I'm mistaken) does either write OR read cycles.
Needless to say, all of these numbers are theoretical, and doesn't take into account latencies and other realities. But nonetheless, your "much much wider bandwidth" statement wasn't true. I'm a nitpicker.