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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."
"More RAM means more caching."
Well, Duh...
Remember the $40/Meg RAM days?
4 GB May Be Vista's RAM Sweet Spot
But I'm guessing it's going to be a sticking point for most consumers. At least, the ones without a sugar daddy.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
It's an MS way to get people interested in the 64-bit edition which doesn't have a RAM 4GB limit :-)
1) Cache contents of entire hard disk to RAM
2) Claim performance boost in Vista
3) Profit!
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
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Right, I have 512Mb, I need to buy 3.5 Gb, that's about £245 in UK prices, or about $460. Another number to add on the price of Vista upgrade..
In before 640K jokes.
Game... blouses.
More RAM == Better!
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eleven plus two / twelve plus one
The article wasn't even big, it was a snippet with a few quotes thrown in. I wonder how much memory that guy is running on.
Jonathanjk.com
Display write and a 3270 emulator.
Vista is very zippy on my 512mb iMac.
means more CASHing!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I'm planning on putting Vista Business on my laptop with a Pentium 4 3.06 GHz, 1GB RAM, and 20GB drive space. Does anyone have any experience with Vista on this kind of system? Note that I don't care if I get to use Aero or not.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
...640 GB should be enough for everyone.
No shit. My Vista Ultimate system uses nearly 1GB RAM at startup, and I don't have many services running or apps installed, since nothing I have works on Vista yet..
At work we decided that having a couple of developers running Vista from day one would the best way to ensure our compatibility. Sounded like a great idea till I drew that particular short straw...
Seriously, this is fucking dumb. Any operating system (including previous versions of Windows) caches data in unused areas of RAM until those areas are needed for currently running applications. Remember when you first run "top" in Linux and noticed that all almost memory was used up? That's because top stupidly shows you the total memory usage without subtracting buffers and cache.
How much does 4GB of ram cost? I don't know the cheapest places to buy RAM but a quick search put a couple 2GB sticks at $450-500 ($225-250 each).
Before Vista came out you could easily get a low to mid-end XP desktop computer for $500.
I run GNU/Linux on a custom box. 2GB of ram works fine for me as a workstation [frankly 1GB would be fine but I do a lot of large builds].
:-)
Fortunately, I didn't have to upgrade my box to choose Gentoo
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
http://catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/wor ld-domination-201.html
So, here we go into the 64bit market.
Anyone have details on Microsofts 64bit offerings? I've never kept up on it.
Clones are people two.
So this may just mean that Vista will start swapping your applications out to disk when you have less than 3G of RAM free.
(I'd put a smiley after that, but it's not really a joke when it might be true. :P )
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.
I thought VISTA was supposed to make our lives easier not harder. Why do we have to buy so much RAM just to get our OS working. Some do not even need 4 GIG unless they have so many high powered programs it's ridiculous. BUT before buying Vista Consumers need to really think what am I really getting for the price and new features.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Is this with: 1) The off the CD software only? 2) With MS only software 3) Regular computer usage? Peace
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
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.
What does Vista do that's really NEW and WANTED in an operating system? Not much. More eye candy? That's worth $300? The customer will decide, but I'll say this:
.exe. And lo, the damn thing is snappy even on my old P233/64MB laptop.
This much bloat simply isn't necessary. Caching is one thing, but the RAM requirements of Vista simply for code space are massive compared to XP for roughly the same functionality. That's a center that cannot hold.
What we expect from an OS is pretty well-known and well-defined now. This means the innovation will slow and there will be increasing reluctance to upgrade simply for the sake of upgrading, especially when the upgrade is a worse performer than the software being upgraded!
This is fertile ground for optimization.
An example:
Compare the executable size and memory utilisation of uTorrent and Azureus. Azureus represents the old guard of BT clients, you might say. A large, bloated code base in Java, implementing features that you wouldn't think would require that much code. And boy it's a dog, and crawls on any sub-1.5Ghz laptop. Enter uTorrent. I would say Azureus is the Vista to uTorrent's microLinux. For the uninitiated, in terms of program size (exe + libs) and memory utilization, we're talking about 170kB/4MB to 7.6MB/16.3MB, respectively. uTorrent was able to bring just about all the features present in Azureus and compact it into a 170kB
I think this will be the end of Microsoft. The API expected for a Windows box is known. It's publicized. The time is ripe for a competitor to come in and reimplement it, using less RAM and resources while conforming to the same standards, and for a fraction of the price. If this were to happen, and if the software companies were to realize they didn't have to sit beholden to *Microsoft's* "Windows" anymore, then we'd really see some fur fly in the marketplace.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
The huge amount of memory required by Vista is not seen the first day or even week. SuperFetch, as the article details, learns what you load and preloads the applications into RAM. So once it figures out that you use everything the first week (trying a new OS), you get crushed the next week when it loads stuff you dont need. If you do not have a schedule for using applications (I know of no one who does) SuperFetch keeps guessing and using RAM.
Vista remembers what you run, and when. it loads all this into ram before your going to need it.
The sweet spot for memory will be vista requirements(512mb or so) + space for whatever apps you usualy concurrently run, IE/FF, photoshop, iTunes, whatever, it'll dump those into system ram before you even click their icons, reduce real world loading times significantly.
Despite the MS jokes, an OS that leaves ram unused isnt doing its job properly, it can always free memory , quickly, if needed.
They have great 64 bit offerings. You just have to purchase 32 licenses for their 2 bit offerings to get there.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Note to *nix users: You want to run *nix? Then shut up and pay for driver/app development.
Note to Mac users: You want to run OS X? Then shut up and pay for the pretty hardware.
Note to Windows users: You want to run Vista? Then shut up and buy the extra memory.
I guess Microsoft figures that they are not going to release another OS for the next 10 years (assuming they're even in the OS business in 10 years time) so they better make it so Vista runs at best performance in about 5 years time.
Heh. Vienna is just around the corner... but don't tell anyone.
Cheers.
Mark
The apps don't use that memory, the os does. The application programs are stored in ram (you know, like a "ram disk"), so that when the program is actually called upon, the program is already in ram and doesn't need to be read from the hard drive (you know, cause the hard drive is slower than the ram). This is a "feature" of the operating system.
Suck a lemon?
After startup, and while no intensive programs are running, Vista will max out its RAM usage to re-index the hard drive for the instant search feature. Once you start using applications, it'll redirect the ram to those programs. It's just trying to make the best use of underutilized resources/clock cycles. It will work with 512MB without problem - indexing just goes slower.
Seriously, though, grow up. THe world is not divided into Vista-hating FSF evangelists and Microsoft shills.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
From Dell's website A Windows Capable PC has 512 MB RAM and is "Great for... Booting the Operating System, without running applications or games.
The guy who says that 4 GB is "optimum" for Vista also says that 2 GB is optimum for XP. I don't know where he gets that, because all of my XP machines run just fine on 512 MB RAM. By using that logic, 1 GB should be just fine for Vista (which is what I've seen).
I don't respond to AC's.
Well, Vista will probably do even better with more RAM, but people with 32bit versions will probably see some diminishing returns above 4GB.
Seriously, though, what is the maximum addressable memory on 32bit Vista? I think it was something like 3GB in Beta 2.
Given the article comment that 2 GB is the "sweet spot" for XP, I don't put much stock in the suggestion that 4 GB is the sweet spot for Vista. I've never run into any serious memory problems running XP on a 1 GB machine, for example.
The real anti-Vista crowd wasn't planning to run Vista at all, so the RAM requirements will elicit little more than a chuckle.
That is the best reason yet to dump Micro$oft.
The cycle looks something like this: Dell makes money when they sell new hardware. Microsoft makes money when they sell new OS and software. The reality is, most people don't need either - they just want systems to surf the web, do email, buy clothes and watch porn. Dell can't force you to upgrade that 3 year-old computer, unless the software runs slllooooooowwwwwww. So, Dell LIKES Microsoft products. Microsoft writes software that needs nice shiny new hardware to run well, with and insane amount of RAM just for the OS. Ironically, the worse the efficiency of the Microsoft software, the more money they BOTH make. Intel is not out of the game either - they make money for new chips sold too - but mostly they are just along for the ride because their product has not become commodity yet like PC memory.
I freed myself from the MS empire when my laptop was stolen and I switched to a Mac laptop in Nov 2005. Now everything is either OSX or Linux, and I havent missed it at all. I still use Word and Excel on Mac - but EVERYTHING else is now gone from my computer life from Microsoft and I like it that way.
I read freshmeat for the first time this morning in like 6 months. I was very happy to see many many packages at post-1.0 realease numbers. Not that it means anything quantitative, but encouraging nevertheless.
with nothing very exciting running - but then I have 2 gig in my system, so would hope it would shove anything that may be useful in there for me.
If you're about to tell me you've only got a gig in your laptop, then that may be a problem - if as I suspect you've got 2Gig, then wtf are you complaining about?
And I said to myself, well, s%&*.
Sometimes I wonder if I think too much.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
True.
Obligatory linux uses less ram post...
But... I have just moved from Ubuntu to Xubuntu, with Beryl (using nvidia, not XGL). In windows speak: I have aero-like graphics
Memory usage seems to hover ~250Mb (running no GUI apps) to ~350Mb (certainly < 400mb) running mplayer, firefox, audacious, abiword, gnumeric, Soft Squeeze etc at the same time. Windows speak: Can play pretty much any media I get, use IM, browse the web, write word and excel docs etc...
I have 1Gb of RAM and 1Gb of swap (which never gets touched).
Genuine question, what functionality would I gain by going to vista and quadrupling my ram?
What would be the "recommended" RAM for a Beryl+KDE desktop? 'cause I'm getting damn good performance with only half a gig here...
It's not really an interesting article. To summarize:
Guy says you need 4GB for sweet spot.
Same Guy says you need 2GB for XP sweet spot.
I'll give you that nowadays you might want 1GB for XP, but 2GB is excessive for most. I know plenty who are happy with 512MB running OS + AV + Word + Browser. (Although 768MB is better.)
Take Minimum Spec, Multiply by 4. That's more likely to be the minimum usable. (See minimum specs for previous MS operating systems for comparison purposes.)
While $500 a stick for 2gb modules is crazy, 4x1gb modules, even high end hyperx/xms modules will cost you about $300 for 4gb of system RAM. Perhaps the close performance comparisons between XP laptops and computers (due to the 'sweet spot' of both being easily and cheaply attainable) have spoiled most, where when they see high end performance requirements, they automatically believe that both laptops and desktops should be on the same level, where that has never, and will never, be the case.
Cash strapped? Just get some RAMDoubler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix and you'll be set, my friend! Only 1GB of RAM, now you have 2GB! It's magic, I tell you!
:P
"Disk compression is nice, let's compress our RAM and really slow things down!!!"
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
So who out there thinks there's some behind-the-scenes scheming between Microsoft and the major memory manufacturers? 4GB to run a friggin' OS? Puhleese...
I got nothin'
Being that a default install of Vista weighs in at 11GB, you should be caching like every DLL and system executable with that much ram. But then you think about it... how fricken long would it take for 4GB of data take to read off a hard drive and cached? And if it takes that long, WHAT *IS* Vista doing?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Some time back (ok, 1979) I built a system to monitor a Dutch nuclear reactor. It monitored temperatures, rod positions, and so on. Nothing important (cough). There was no suggestion of keeping costs down to save money (and I'm glad).
...] ...]
The system had two colour graphic displays, a printer or two, and 4 operator terminals. It ran a real time, multi tasking operating system (called RSX11).
The main system had 128kb of memory. Yes, 128kb.
Today my dev machine has 2Gb of memory and the 3Ghz processor must - surely - be some thousands of times as fast.
So I have 15,000 times as much memory, a processor perhaps 3,000 times as fast (I'm guessing, as figures are hard to pin down). That sounds like 445 million times as much power to me.
And what do we do with all this grunt? Well damn, solitare looks good these days.
So, were the old programmers really, really good? [We were, we were
Are the new ones really, really bad? [hang on, I'm still at it
Have we stopped caring about size and performance of programs?
I think all of these things are slightly true - we used to care deeply about program speed and footprint. Now we don't.
I suspect it has gone much too far - programs are far slower to load than they were even 5 years ago - they are large and bloated, and don't share things well. Anybody remember Sidekick - it was wonderful - and it was available at the touch of key (ok, 2 keys). Remember how FAST it was? I know it didn't do much, but it was dashed useful.
And I still can't beleive I still write "for" loops.
"Cats like plain crisps"
Sure enough, that's exactly what it says. What in the hell use is a computer with just an OS running and nothing else? This is what that call "capable"? Ay Carumba!
Brett
640 GiByte should be enough for anyone.
Translation:
/. post.)
It's FUD that you need more RAM.
I always need more RAM.
(Yeah, another logical
Developers: We can use your help.
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'
This just goes back to the old saying that "unused memory is wasted memory."
You should always cache as much as possible.
The problem is, if consumers saw their memory usage at 100% all the time, they would freak out.
I've had 4gb for a while, as I use Photoshop heavily. I'm going to make the vista jump just so that I can run more/all of that 4gb, plus get some 64 bit action.
-- Dave
up 12 days, 22:30, 2 users, load averages: 993.20, 994.21, 994.56
*makes note to limit user processes...
The satisfaction in knowing that you are no longer using an operating system that directly contributes to the decline of Microsoft's profits?
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex. I could pinch them."
Marvin the Martian
Which would you rather do? Spend the time to make your code more efficient, or just tell everyone to buy another stick of RAM?
Besides, I'm pretty sure Microsoft is getting kickbacks from memory chip vendors.
Disclaimer: I am no fan of MS or Windows, and for that matter of Apple etc.
But! Let there be reason, people! "An IBM consultant talks about Microsoft product and speculates unreasonable requirements for Vista." Am I the only one focussing on IBM-Microsoft rivalry and not on Vista?
Are you even using Vista? I haven't even seen one installed anywhere near me.
I have it on good authority that nobody should need more than 640K
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
aero and Windows genuine advantage... written from a laptop with 1 gig of ram and a 1 gig swap (which like yours is unuset) running gentoo amd64.
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!!!
It is hard to see how 3G can be gobbled up by some eye candy and other "UI innovations".
It's not actually. Vista is much more aggressive in memory usage, it will claim as much as it can for caching and release when needed. Once superfetch (and readyboost) auto-optimize themselves (it takes a little while for it to learn what you're doing and adapt itself), you'll understand why the extra memory gives a nice boost.
2GB is great, which is what I used in XP. (I'm running developer tools and VMs, so 4GB would be great, even in XP)
....if you don't want Vista to run like OSX.
Besides, this will just accelerate the "faster and cheaper every month" rule for hardware. It's a good thing(tm)
do() || do_not();
Now, I've been flamed by people for saying that you actually need 2 GB with a fully loaded WinVista machine to actually use it well - playing a game in foreground while it does a virus check in background and you have a few documents and database links open in the background.
But you don't need 4 GB.
Can you use it? Sure. But you really only need 2 GB if you have a decent video card - which you better have.
Just because you need 2 GB doesn't mean the sweet spot is twice that.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Some people have hinted at BIOS settings etc but I can't find it. During POST it shows the 4GB. This is a quad-core on a EVGA SLI mobo and supposedly it supports up to 8GB. Vista Home Premium 32-bit is supposed to support it yet in the system settings it shows about 2800 MB total memory.
Loading up all that RAM takes a lot of time and shows poor design. If you've got XGB of RAM, you may as well *use* it to cache commonly used data etc. and speed up your system, rather than just have it sit there like a lemon. Please tell me how doing this "shows poor design"?
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
emm.sys. That should send waves of chills through the grey-hairs here!
Jeez
What's the difference between Windows XP's "Prefetch" and Vista's "SuperFetch"? Is it just more aggressive? XP also put applications and data in memory, saving copies in the C:\WINNT\Prefetch folder so that they would even load back up on the next machine boot, thus supposedly saving time when launching frequently-used applications. I have two problems with it, though:
For Windows XP, run RegEdit and change the value of \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Contr ol\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters\EnablePrefetcher from "3" to "0" to turn off Prefetch altogether. Then, you can delete all the files in the C:\WINNT\Prefetch folder, reboot, and enjoy a faster running computer. If you have enough memory, and you find that the Prefetcher actually helps, just change that registry key back to a "3" and reboot.
Loose lips lose spit.
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).
But if you turn off Aero and all that stuff, why bother upgrading in the first place?
So that you can see the Black Screen of Are You Sure You Want To Run That Program?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
When MS said 64K was all the memory anyone would ever need
When programs on even other system were not blotted to be large but performed very well.
When the price of ram was very high.
When programs loaded much quicker.
What does all this mean?
You'll have to defrag your drive more often... as programs will grow in size.
It seems the software industry will fill up any shelf space you provide it with.
More spyware too...
Here's hoping that Vista helps lower hardware prices across the board. I'd love to be able to build a screaming fast and powerful machine for a grand or so.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
I guess it's comparing apples and oranges, in a way, but my system drive for linux (OS AND all apps, but not personal data) takes up 3.6 gB of hard drive space. Granted, I don't have any particularly huge apps on it, but still. With my typical memory footprint, I could pretty much have my OS and all apps in memory as well. It's obviously not an entirely fair comparison, but it does put things into perspective.
I dont trust either M$ or IBM or Apple or *N*X ... it's all hype right now ...
This article is just a nicely printed/written version of the MS/*N*X/MAC flamewars we all enjoy. So whatever ... I'll just wait for SP1 (2.0 or "Leopard" or whatever the next cut is) and see what is really required.
...
Hell No - I'll Never Go - One DOT Oh
Hell No - I'll Never Go - One DOT Oh
Hell No - I'll Never Go - One DOT Oh
I'm still trying to figure out how one addresses 4GB+ of RAM on a 32-bit machine....
Maybe it is because I work on 64-bit unix boxes at work (with ungody high amounts of RAM) and my souped up Mac at home, but it seems as if Microsoft is about the only platform left that hasn't wholesale jumped on a 64 bit platform (and even then, it seems to me that Microsoft is driven more towards 64 bit processing by gaming constraints)...
The OP said "4GB for the OS alone?". This was what I was responding to. The actual space the operating system takes up as itself is not the same as the space into which it caches frequently used applications and data.
E.g. in Linux, "free -m" will even explicitly seperate out the figures for memory used by the OS itself & running programs, and that which the OS is caching files into. Windows doesn't explicitely do this, which is possibly where your confusion stems from.
I'm afraid I do not see what is difficult to understand about this.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
i have only 512mb of ram and vista runs sweeter than xp ever did. i cant believe all the crap i have read about vista since its release i barely meet the minimum specs of vista and its been awsome. it just goes to show how much first hand experience helps you to see right through the bullshit.
I Predict A Riot
It's very fast. I run a Dreamscape background of a video of lava flowing into the ocean, use Office 2007, and a few other apps on a SATA mirror, even with sucky NVidia drivers the thing does fly.
UNTIL....
you load Flight Simulator X with all the options turned up. X-2 4400, 4G RAM, and Microsoft can still bring a computer to its knees with their game software.
So in other words, you just wanted to pick on an anti-windows guy and someone called you out, so now you have to try to come up with something and claim that a function of the os is not a part of the os. Right? The memory used for the "SuperFetch" function is not part of the os?
Suck a lemon?
All hail Larry the Cow!
Seriously, 512MB is plenty for gentoo - I'm running it on a 2.4GhZ P4m w/512MB, and I have dm-crypt+LUKS, kde, mysql, apache, and a bunch of other stuff running at any given time - on my laptop. That's the great thing about linux in general and gentoo in particular - You can build anything with it.
That's "optimal"? Holy crap! I have only one gig on my FreeBSD/KDE box, and I have NEVER EVER touched swap. This isn't a minimal setup server machine, it's my primary desktop. And it's not a minimalist 1990's TWM desktop either. It's a full KDE "out of the box" with all the bells and whistles turned on. This is my work machine, so it's doing work. But I have never touched swap. I've got so much RAM free I'm tempted to mount my /tmp directory there.
Four gigs for an optimal sweet spot for Vista is freaking ridiculous.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
He never godl you that he is running Vista in Parallels http://www.parallels.com/ on OSX! duh! Of course you need 4GB.
step 1.
have system memory of at least 1GB (ideally 2GB) searching at newegg 2GB kits (DDR2) starting at $130~ (not that i'd buy those ones =p)
Step 2.
buy 1 or 2GB USB flashdrive (meeting requirements for readyboost) enable readyboast....and enjoy.
btw I'm running Vista on a FX55 w/ 1GB ram right now...it is FINE...
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
Not surprised, after all, it takes a lot of power to constantly wrestle control away from the user. DRM is not easy to implement you know.
[alk]
Most laptops can't support more than 2GB. So does this mean Vista really does suck for laptops? Yikes. FWIW, I'm running a 2GB laptop with Vista and I have absolutely no problems. But we'll see how things run in a few years when apps start hogging even more memory.
Vista runs fine for me with 2 GB of DDR400 RAM. Athlon X2 4200 (Socket 939), SATA 3GB drive, Nvidia GeForce 7800 GT.
(* I say 'usually' because if someone often uses, say, WMP, then it may well happen that Superfetch will cache WMP into memory, and if you count WMP as 'part of the OS' (thhough the EU would disagree with you), then indeed, Superfetch will find itself caching part of the OS. This is the exception, however.)
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
...is SuperFetch (or whatever it is) any different to what my Ubuntu machine does (and always has done)?
I know, I know, slightly offtopic, but I gotta know what the hype is about.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
For $4 I can't afford _not_ to buy it!
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
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.
Not.
I am not anti-Vista - in fact, I am happily running Vista right now, a few feet away from my Linux box and Mac box (and believe it or not, there have not been any fisticuffs so far in my den). But, as you should correctly assume from my varied choices of OS, I do not worship Microsoft.
PCI is stealing space to perform MMIO [memory mapped I/O].
You need a 64-bit OS that can understand physical memory remapping. My Opteron workstation had the same problem [space between 3-4GB was stolen] so my box which has 6GB of ram actually goes from 0-3GB and 4-7GB. Linux reads the e820 map from the BIOS and goes on it's merry way.
A 32-bit OS won't be too friendly in this respect. Technically you can address upto 16GB with a 32-bit OS [using PAE] but iirc Windows doesn't support it (at least not on the consumer side). Basically all 32-bit x86 processors nowadays support PAE [a feature once reserved for server parts].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
How much of the Vista UI (or the base OS apps) is written in C#?
- sigs are for wimps.
My hair is still brown, but it worked.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
I'm sorry, that is just lazy, sloppy programming.
the tribal peoples of asia should be ashamed of themselves for putting out this horrible excuse for programming.
They're using their grammar skills there.
and we had to walk eight miles to school, in the snow, uphills both ways ... and you know what? We like it! Best of all that one bit doubled as a light switch.
If it was just upgrading you'd be right - no reason to probably. But if you wanted to buy a new computer you'd find you don't have a choice, you get Vista. At least at the major online venues like Dell, HP, etc.
OS/2 on 4 Megs of RAM would boot, and that's about it. It's equivalent to Vista on 256 Megs of RAM.
In 1995 I bought 16 megs of RAM for my system, to run Win 95, but also OS/2 Warp, Linux, etc. 16 megs. It cost me $500... USED! I bought 32 Megs for a machine at work, and that cost use $1200.
Today... I can get 2 gigs for $200, and 4 gigs for $500.
In 1995 I paid like $275 for a 1 gig harddrive. Today I'm getting 500 gig drives for $150.
The level of resources required by Win95, Linux, OS/2, etc. back in the days when they came out was expensive. Vista is cheap by comparison.
...it caches apps in RAM to speed up performance, but runs 'sub-optimally' until you bump it... to 4GB? Just how much caching does this thing do?!
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
Do you need a 350hp Hemi engine in order to use your air conditioning, power steering, brakes, cruise control, radio, and power windows? Your analogy does not apply, sorry.
I got nothin'
Isn't Aero suppose to off-load everything to the graphics card? I'm fine so far with Vista and 1GB of memory. Runs the same as XP.
Wow, my mac has SuperFetch. Seriously. OS X calls it 'inactive memory', been there for as long as I can remember. Another great new and original feature.
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.)
I've always been surprised by what people find. I'm running on an A64@2.2GHz with 1.5GB of RAM. Vista boots faster, loads programs faster, shuts down much faster, and the time it takes to switch between programs is virtually nonexistent, all compared to XP. I will admit that a few games aren't quite as fast as they were on XP, but considering the drivers for the cards suck right (which, by the way, is no fault of Microsoft), it's excusable. The install also went smoothly, no problems whatsoever and detected everything the first time.
Also, you can disable UAC in this awesome little menu called...wait for it..."User Account Control". Oh yeah, I dual-boot this machine with Gentoo. Once again, no problems.
So the multiply by 4 rule has changed to multiply by 8 rule with vista. From 95 to windows XP it was a known fact that if you wanted optimum performance you always add 4 times the ram recomended by microsoft. if it was 64mb for windows me you would get good perfomance only if you put 512 ram. with xp too you need atleast 1 gb of ram for it run smoothly.
The really sad thing about parent is that, despite looking like a knee-jerk troll reaction when first posted, based on this thread, it ended up being downright prophetic. Makes you want to cry.
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
Any one else remember when we had a fit when Windows liked 4 megs of RAM. Hell, I can't even go beyond 1GB of RAM on my Thinkpad A31p.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Ads and salesdroids tell him to buy Vista, so he does so that he does not get left behind etc (all the FUD stuff). There's also the factor that he wants "the best". He's shelling out a pile of clams for his new computer and wants that feel-good that he's buying up to date modern stuff.
It is very sad that a company with all MS's resources and abilities can blow $5bn and come up with.... well.... nothing really.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"Unloading" doesn't take much time, but you could argue loading does. You must read data off a very slow hard drive into system memory. If the caching system is smart, it will be very careful about what it caches so this becomes a benefit instead of a curse. The advantage comes if vista can precache something before you need it and keep the disk busy instead of giving it short bursts of large IO to do. Its also helpful if the file system has been defragmented first.
Caching is usually a benefit in operating system design. Apple's been using this trick for years with OS X and many unix like systems do similar things. I know it seems counter intuitive, but many operating system design decisions do. Its the same reason browsers cache previously viewed pages in memory. You very well could hit back or part of the content could be reused. Hard drives are slow.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Your understanding of the LDDM (WGL, or whatever the heck you want to call it) is grossly oversimplified and vastly fanboyish.
"Intelligently sharing textures between video card ram and system ram".
You keep saying that, yet I do not think you know what it means.....
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
You don't have non-tearing movement of windows.
You don't have a working clipboard.
You can't play two separate streams at the same time from different applicaitons and blend them.
"The time it takes to erase something from RAM is negligible."
Yeah, it basically doesn't exist. The point was why load the crap in there in the first place. Assuming it always does this, regardless of the RAM in the system.....assume 1/2 of the 900mb (out of 1Gb) in used RAM on my system right now is frequently used....(running XP x64, not Vista)...that's probably about right, if no a low estimate....what sense does it make to load 450 or so MB in when I decide to just play Oblivion or something and none of that is used, and might even be written over?
If you are using Vista x32, do *not* buy more than 3 GB of memory or you will be just throwing your money away.
... of course they do, they make a profit from hardware sales!
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
Bet you feel like a big man now. You had the indisputable courage to post anonomously, putting down all who frequent slashdot. Congratulations, Senor Coward, truly congrats. However, I hope everyone will notice that our friend Mr. Coward himself is apparently a /. reader, as he was clearly here to read the summary, then proceeded to the article, then took the time to read through comments on the article, and post his truly well constructed views on all of us lame /.ers so that we may all revel in his wisdom and see the error of our foolish ways for wanting to discuss and have opinions on technology news. I know I feel humbled by his observations, and I certainly hope the rest of you feel the same way too. We certainly were lucky you posted here today, or who knows what other horrible opinions we may have expressed.
I posted a whole news article that got reject and apparently Vista using 680MB of RAM for no reason isn't important or worth discussing? Turn off virtual memory, all startup progams, and all services not critical to Vista. You'll count 20-30MB tops on startup (minus the task manager of course). Where is the other 680MB of RAM that's being used going to? My assumption is that this release is just to boost sales of computer hardware.
- John
http://www.jabcreations.com/
Am I the only one reminded of the Infocom game Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy whenever someone describes their experience with Vista?
Corridor, Aft End
This is one end of a short corridor that continues fore along the main deck of the Heart of Gold. Doorways lead to aft and port. In addition, a gangway leads downward.
>go south
That entrance leads to the Infinite Improbability Drive chamber. It's supposed to be a terribly dangerous area of the ship. Are you sure you want to go in there?
>go south
Absolutely sure?
>go south
I can tell you don't want to really. You stride away with a spring in your step, wisely leaving the Drive Chamber safely behind you. Telegrams arrive from well-wishers in all corners of the Galaxy congratulating you on your prudence and wisdom, cheering you up immensely.
>go south
What? You're joking, of course. Can I ask you to reconsider?
>go south
Engine Room
You're in the Infinite Improbability Drive chamber. Nothing happens; there is nothing to see.
>look
I mean it! There's nothing to see here!
>look
Okay, okay, there are a FEW things to see here...
(the above with all due respect to Douglas Adams, Steve Meretzky, and Infocom)
My XP box at home runs on 512 megs. My laptop with Windows Media Center Edition (It came with MCE pre-installed) runs pretty fine with 1GB DDR2 ram, but some apps take time to load/run (but it's normally stuff like CATIA or MATLAB). Overall, it works fine. Quite obviously, this post has nothing meaningful to add to the conversation.
I have bad karma. What do I care what you think?
And to reinforce that point a bit... Vista is faster when it's cached those programs. I have a dual boot XP/Vista box... ~60 seconds to load up my currently most common
Bill Gates announces it with this quote:
"640GB ought to be the minimum for everybody!"
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Your post makes me wonder whether Microsoft might eventually add various personalities to the Vista warnings.
Eg, as Martin the depressive robot :
OS : You are about to visit a web page. It sounds like fun, but I'm just stuck being a boring OS assistant. Do you really want to go there?
You : Yes
OS : Figures, I'll never have even a fraction of the fun you're having using this computer. That page wants to run a flash application. Are you sure you want to go to that web page?
You : yes, dammit
OS : You are annoyed at me, I'm just a dumb lowly Operating System security warning system. You probably don't even care about me at all. Do you want me to stop nagging you?
You : YES, PLEASE shut the hell up
OS : Oh, that's great, I've been programmed with state of the art security warning information, and you just don't want to appreciate my pathetic self. Are you sure you really want to turn me off?
You : YES, go away and never come back.
OS : Fine, I'll just sit here in my own misery, and hope that you turn me back on one day, which you probably won't.
make world, not war
"You need 4GB if you want optimal performance".
"optimal"??? If you have 8GB, you'll gonna get worse performance?
Don't buy 2gb sticks, get 4 1gb sticks. It's a lot cheaper. Don't even bother looking at 4gb sticks.
Well, the OP was referring to $400 costing more than his whole computer. So, he's got piece of crap Dell or something he dragged home from the closeout table at the membership warehouse. Which means he's got two memory slots he might be able to get to - and his architecture can only support 3.2GB of RAM anyway. (somebody can explain here what that thing is that's masked into the top ~800MB of a 4GB address space that masks the high RAM).
If Vista needs 4GB of RAM it's not ready for the current generation of typical desktop computers. That's OK though - Microsoft only expected it to be tied to new OEM sales anyway.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Yeah, it takes a while to change from HAVING the RAM to USING the RAM. I was helped cold turkey using MS SQL, which grabs almost all your RAM and relinquishes it as other programs need it. I do miss having 4 gigs of free RAM, but what good is that?
And I say once again (as a NIX professional) that Vista's pretty damn good. Gone are the days when Windows was a toy. No longer. It has plenty of bullshit legacy cruft, but Vista is a BIG improvement.
Live CDs laugh at Vista's bloat. The average gnu/linux distribution can fit into a 2GB file system that compresses down to 700 MB, and that's how you get live CDs. Those images usually contain everything - all the free drivers in existence, an auto configuration utility, the majority of the GNU stack, at least two window managers, two or three browsers, email clients, fonts, artwork, Open Office, gimp and several kitchen sinks. With 4 GB of RAM, you could cache everything uncompressed twice! A Linux system with that kind of memory would simply fly. A stripped down distro does most of the same things with lighter applications in 60 MB, but still has more GUI features than Vista does. How many DVDs do Vista and Office come on these days? How long do you think it will take M$ to have drivers that work?
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Sigh. I wish you fuckers would, at least, http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsv ista/features/details/performance.mspx>read about it first, and then start with the design theory what-if arguments. Just because you've identified that a problem is not always simple, does not mean that it has not been solved already and plainly documented.
Loading happens in the background, at a low priority. (Yes, Vista can and does prioritize disk IO.) It is therefore nearly free.
Defragmentation also happens, regularly and automatically by default, in the background at low priority. It works well. A typical Vista installation will probably not ever show substantial file fragmentation. This reduces the cost of "nearly free", as above, by a substantial factor.
Kid-proof tablet..
what sense does it make to load 450 or so MB in when I decide to just play Oblivion or something and none of that is used, and might even be written over?
What sense does it make? It helps you out substantially when you're operating the computer in your typical fashion. You deviate from the norm, you get a cache miss. Nothing new here.
What's new is the flurry of crazy-eyed weird fuckers like yourself who keep missing the point: It's faster this way, and it costs absolutely nothing in performance. Who gives a shit if it misses from time to time? It's -free-, and harmed you none by missing.
At any rate, this caching happens at low priority. If the computer had something better to do (like load Oblivion), it'd be bloody doing it. Instead, it's keeping itself busy trying to prepare itself for the next thing that you might ask of it.
Kid-proof tablet..
you don't need caching. Core 2 Duo E6700, 2GB DDR2 800 (upgrading to 1066 when cache, oops, I mean cash allows), 3x320GB SATA II Raid 0, 256MB GeForce 7600GS, etc., etc. Damn, now Microslop wants to control what goes up into your ram and when, f**k that. Microslop peaked with 2k, XPoopoo is to 2k what Me was to 98. As a matter of fact, the Windhose partition on this machine is 2k sp4, have an XPoopoo 'Home' disk but nobody wants to buy it for a fair price so it just sits and collects dust, ran like sh*t on this machine. I don't have time for buggy and I don't have time for superbloat, are they going insane at Microslop? How come I can boot Sabayon Linux 3.26 live DVD and get the nVidia driver, acceleration and Beryl right out of the box and not have the insane bloat and ram hogging of Vista. Bottom line, if your computer can support 4GB of ram, it's plenty fast enough to execute programs when they are required and not before. Microslop screwed up again, they wrote some more superbloat before people are actually ready to go out and spend another 2 or 3 grand on something that can actually run Vista. My machine was NOT cheap, the average Windhose droid doesn't buy high end, guess they will just shut off all the bloat candy, no, wait, Vista does that for them. Apparently even my video card is not good enough for the 'Ultimate' version. I gotta go out and spend another $300 to run 'Ultimate'? Not likely, I don't even like XPoopoo. >:-l
I'd love to see the CAPP/EAL4 configuration guide for Vista. It should probably list a couple hundred unnecessary processes that will be turned off in order to pass the qualification. I have used the list for WinXP to good effect - turn all the shit off and the desktop runs a lot faster without any loss of any features I need. See this: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyId=A7075319-CC3D-4420-A00B-8C9A7068AD54&displa ylang=en
Page 275 lists all the redundant processes in WinXP that can be turned off.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
"If vista scales all the way to 4"
j pg
h readid=656242%5D
What do you mean? 64-bit Vista scales to 1000 Gigabyte (1TB). 32-bit Vista? Probably just 2 GB.
Here is a warning message "Too little memory" using 2GB with Vista and trying to play "Company of Heroes"
http://img525.imageshack.us/img525/6359/minnetf2.
[I didn't take that screenshot. I saw it linked here:
http://www.sweclockers.com/forum/showthread.php?t
---
How we know is more important than what we know.
With Vista you get better DRM so that the pirates cannot steal your movies and credit cards.
Agreed. Aero Glass is disabled when running a full screen DirectX application, or a windowed DirectX 9 application. In theory DirectX 10 apps will be able to run, due to the GPU being able to context switch.
The guides that I've seen showing differences between gaming with Aero (dis/en)abled showed statistically insignificant differences (even that one where having it enabled was a touch faster).
Alt-tabbing out of games on vista seems to be a bit quicker for me (though this might be the newly installed system effect).
I have to say though, ReadyBoost does add to the snappyness, and I'm only using a gig on a Lexar high speed stick, so I'm only backing half my 2 gig of ram. MS recommends a 1:1 to 1:2.5 ratio to get the most out of it.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
Why was this moderated as insightful? I'm not saying that TheNetAvenger was right but WhiteWolf666 merely went "Your wrong!!1!" without adding a single thing to the discussion.
Fucking Slashdot. You make a dying Kuro5hin look better every day.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
It gives you the ability to play DRM'd content! As an example those nice shiny HDDVD / Bluray disks, which appear to come with a ridiculously complicated key system specifically geared to ruin pirates' ("Yarrr!"), linux users' ("Tux LOL!"), and the End-User's ("Six packs?") day. It means that the lucky few that have capable hardware and find the Golden Decryption Key in their packet (combined with the one hidden in their player, TPM, tv, dogs anus and first born) can watch high definition movies!
For the rest there is only technically inferior solutions. Like BitTorrent with its *ahem* inferior experience. You'll be stuck playing non-DRM bit-perfect rips on your cheaper yet equally capable television. Haha! Sucker!
That said, its not like the DRM in Vista is in the way until you go to play DRM content. In that case it will at least do a better job than a non-DRM capable OS, which will probably imitate a brick or something.
Personally I guess I'll stick with the *cough* clearly inferior BitTorrent, because my terribly crap Dell 24" screen doesnt have the HDCP capable port and $200 higher price tag of the model above it. Seems my hardware has been made incapable of playing legit high def DRM content. Whatever shall I do? (*coughbittorrent*)
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
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.
come on... he asked a 'genuine question'... your tone wasn't exactly pleasant there. You coulda just explained the differences. Something more like: well, the differences I've found between Ubuntu/Beryl and Aero are that Aero has non-tearing movement of windows (which means?), the clipboard works better and you can play two separate streams at the same time form different applications and blend them. There, now that wasn't hard, was it? Common courtesy, people! (don't mean to pick on you specifically, but I've found myself wanting to plug my ears and repeat 'I will not become a Linux jackass... I will not become a Linux jackass... I will not become a Linux jackass', and I think sometimes it is easy to forget that we're talking to real people here) And while I'm at it... people... stop bringing up the 'Are you sure... are you really sure' crap about Vista... it gets tiring to see it in every single discussion. I mean, honestly! I say, let people try out Vista. If it doesn't work for them, or they think it sucks, then give them other options. Same way, let me run my Linux and don't try and shove Apple or Windows down my throat. I'm happy with what I'm using, I can speak to many positive things about it, and yes, there are limitations. So back off!
Yes, the 32-bit processor can see 4GB worth of memory, but some of that memory space is taken up by the graphics card, the PCI slots, etc. See http://www.vistaclues.com/reader-question-maximum- memory-in-32-bit-windows-vista/ for more detail and experiences. Most people end up with about 3GB, give or take half a gig.
I'm sick and tired of these hip, "ironic" sigs. This is an actual, honest-to-goodness no-nonsense sig!
Have we stopped caring about size and performance of programs?
No. But our limits of acceptability have changed. As processing power has gotten cheaper, developers (myself included) have focused more on getting features out to market faster, rather than application performance.
I think all of these things are slightly true - we used to care deeply about program speed and footprint. Now we don't.
That's always been correct. We care more about how many features are available at what cost, so long as performance isn't noticably bad on commodity hardware.
Do you remember when c was considered a "high level language"? What about the debates on how slow programs written in c were? I do. Times have changed....
I suspect it has gone much too far - programs are far slower to load than they were even 5 years ago - they are large and bloated, and don't share things well.
I don't know about that. Perhaps you don't remember loading DOS programs like PC-Write on an 8086 processer with 512K RAM? That was my word processor of choice, and it got slower the longer your document was. By the time you passed 100k, it was a dog.
Anybody remember Sidekick - it was wonderful - and it was available at the touch of key (ok, 2 keys). Remember how FAST it was? I know it didn't do much, but it was dashed useful.
I sure do. I also remember the care with with I never hit the two space bars together in a graphics program. (That would universally crash my computer). It shared TEXT ok, but anything graphical was another mess entirely.
And I still can't beleive I still write "for" loops.
If you don't mind me asking, what would you RATHER be writing?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Is 4 GB the sweet spot or the minimum? I mean, does your computer actually run faster with 4 GB than with 8 GB? Or is "4 GB is the sweet spot" just a nice way of saying "if you have less than 4GB, performance will suffer"?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Your tools are for-loops and very occassionally recursion, eh pal? Ever heard of map? Folding higher order functions? Remember, you bang the rocks together.
Beryl isn't ready for everyday usage and it's not Aero - however, care to explain this:
You can't play two separate streams at the same time from different applicaitons and blend them.What kind of streams are you talking about? If they're audio streams, ALSA has been included by default in every kernel in the 2.6-series and can mix multiple sources just fine. If you're talking about video streams - well, I just can't see why I'd want to blend video streams. Should there be a valid reason please do educate me.
.The really sad thing about parent is that, despite looking like a knee-jerk troll reaction when first posted, based on this thread, it ended up being downright prophetic. Makes you want to cry.
Pretty sad, eh? Thing is, I didn't post it as a troll... I knew the thread would devolve into it. I'm not psychic. I just know the gathering call of the anti-MS crowd all too well... and anytime anyone mentions RAM, that's the best thing to draw them out.
But it still makes me want to cry.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Six Packs is that? My thumbs hurt! 10,922 !!! Egads Bill what happened to no one needing more then 640k ?!?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
But his point still stands about loading it in the first place. Last I checked, NTFS still fragments, and read() can still block
All's true that is mistrusted
Workbench 3.1 on Amiga runs fine (fast, quick, responsive etc...) with 0.5 MB (yes, 500 kb memory). Another reason why AmigaOS is better than Windows!
My homepage: www.erkan.se
I bought my current machine with 4GB RAM (a 32-bit Pentium M on an aOpen i915Ga-HFS motherboard).
:-)
I was annoyed that the OS could only see (approx) 3GB of that, even though the BIOS "supported" 4GB max. Most of the memory addresses (not actual RAM, just the addresses) are reserved for hardware devices that might or might not be installed, so anything over 3GB just can't be used.
I sold 2x1GB on eBay, and replaced it with 2x512MB, because I couldn't sleep at night knowing that the RAM wasn't getting used. So, if Vista will make good use of all the RAM that it can see (in my machine at least)? Perfect
Your understanding of the LDDM (WGL, or whatever the heck you want to call it) is grossly oversimplified and vastly fanboyish.
. aspx
x .aspx
First off, LDDM was the code name from back in 2005, (Longhorn Device Driver Model); however, since Vista is NOT called Longhorn, the name is now referred to as WDDM (Windows Device Driver Model). Ever hear of Wikipedia or Google? This is easy stuff to look up, even for causal SlashDot readers.
As for my understanding of Vista's driver model and handling of GPU textures I won't repeat myself, and instead will point you to find the answers for yourself because you do seem either angry or confused.
"WDDM enables multiple applications to utilize the GPU simultaneously by implementing the following:
GPU memory manager--arbitrates video memory allocation
GPU scheduler--schedules various GPU applications according to their priority
With these technologies, applications no longer have to cede the GPU when another application requiring its services starts-up. Instead, the GPU is scheduled in a more efficient fashion."
From: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480220
"WDDM now allows for "virtualized" video memory. Virtualization abstracts video memory so that it is no longer necessary to think about creating a resource in either video or system memory. Just specify what the resource is going to be used for and the system will place the memory in the best place possible. Additionally, virtualization allows for the allocation of more memory than actually exists on the hardware. Memory is then paged into the correct hardware as needed."
From: http://www.microsoft.com/indonesia/msdn/wvddirect
I would pull more technical stuff for you, but based on the 'quality' of your response, I grabbed the first non-technical documents on this for you to read and reference.
Next time, do your own homework before attacking someone's post that you have NO CLUE what you are even responding to.
PS - Will the person that modded the parent post 'Insightful', please also take a minute to actually look some of this stuff up before clapping like a silly schoolboy on something they ALSO know nothing about.
it is a well known fact that anyone describing operating system performance in terms of "snappiness" has no idea how to measure operating system performance, and is probably a victim of the placebo effect.
s /2007/03/VistaKernel/
It's always been true for Mac fanboys, and it's true for Vista ones too...
I don't know anything about the parent poster you were responding to, but there are a lot of people relate 'snappiness' to application startup and switch times, you know, 'responsiveness'.
Here is a link; he doesn't use the word 'snappiness', but I think he means what the parent post was talking about. Also, even in the SlashDot world, I don't think many people would argue this person doesn't know what they are talking about.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issue
But if you turn off Aero and all that stuff, why bother upgrading in the first place?
Hi!
You seem to be looking for a Windows Vista feature list.
Do you want me to find a Windows Vista feature list?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Oh come on -- it's poor design in Vista, it's good design in Firefox!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Vista is the upgrade no-one wants.
Except if you happen to have to use Windows for one reason or another. Then you can just as well take an upgrade, because after all is said and done, there's a lot of feature improvements to see here over XP, sarcasms aside. Opinions like yours just show how brainwashed some of you guys really are. I very much like shadow copies, integrated indexed searching and tagging throughout the OS, the kernel improvements for user mode drivers, and much more in there.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Why don't you generate some benchmarks to prove your point? Speculation is useless in computer architecture. Do some experiments yourself with SiSoft. It's funness!
This is why I don't have a job in Marketing at Microsoft. I'd have called it "Shit everyone else has been doing for a good 10 years and we finally decided it was a good idea and implemented it except you don't need four gigs to make it work in Linux or OSX fetch." I guess after the mandatory lobotomy marketroids get when they go into the field you're much more likely to see things from upper management's point of view...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Yes, if this news is true, expect the standard configurations to come with 2-4 GB of memory. Imagine what a feast it will be under Linux!
As other posters mention, we now can have external harddrives, USB2, Firewire, real multitasking on core 2 duo processors (although I dont notice much difference on my Macbook Pro), you can burn DVDs but memorysticks are starting to be more attractive, record digital photography, video and sound with a mobile phone! Etc.. Etc.
Before glorifying the days of old, look at what we have.
Heres the specs for the C64:
Introduced: January 1982
Released: September 1982
How many: ~17 million
Price: US $595.
CPU: MOS 6510, 1MHz
Sound: SID 6581, 3 channels of sound
RAM: 64K
Display: 25 X 40 text
320 X 200, 16 colors max
Ports: TV, RGB & composite video
2 joysticks, cartridge port
serial peripheral port
Peripherals: cassette recorder
printer, modem
external 170K floppy drive
OS: ROM BASIC
Notice that? Resolution at 320 x 200 16 colours. That translates to 4000 bytes of graphics memory..
Now my Macbook Pro can do 1680 x 1050 32-bit colour. That is over 7MB of graphics memory. (Is this correctly calculated?)
That doesnt include the 3D capabilities and other stuff going on in the background.
The old machines would be slow as molasses on higher resolutions. Hell, just try with an old computer with a new videocard, if even possible. Notice the lag. Expanding both X and Y-resolution and even colour, makes the juice required exponential..
What we need to focus on though, is the user experience. Both Apple and Microsoft has something to learn about GUIs I think.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
If it turns out to be true that future improvements on CPUs will be more on the number of cores than the raw GHz speed, maybe we'll see this situation getting better. I say this because not all applications are easily parallelizable, so developers who want to differentiate themselves from the competition in terms of performance will really have to optimize their algorithms...
Now the question is: will the market and developers give more value to more features and bloat, or performance?
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
"...Even with 1GB you are good with AERO,..." I disagree... I was running an AMD 3000+ (Barton) w/ 2X512MB and an ATI Radeon 9600SE (software OC'd to take advantage of the R350 graphics engine), and M$ wouldn't let me enable AERO. Nor could I multi-task without severe performance degradation/crashing. And this machine was rated 1.0 on the performance index, hilariously! It runs perfect on XP (which I am back to using, btw), I can play any game with ease (and full graphics!), and multi-tasking has never been an issue.
the significance of a signature is insignificant
My computer runs aero perfectly fine with 512MB. With all those UAC prompts giving vista more time (which I have disabled), you wouldn't notice any difference in speed anyway.
Today a program has far more software layers than the programs of yesteryear. A .NET or Java procedure call, for example, has to go through the virtual machine, the virtual machine through the native DLLs, the native DLLs through Win32, Win32 through the NTOS translation layer, the NTOS layer through the drivers, the drivers through the kernel, the kernel through the HAL, the HAL through the drivers again (the vxd part). And, upon return of the procedure, the reverse road has to be followed.
Install Windows 3.1 on a modern computer and be amazed on how fast the whole thing is. Put the installation files in a hard disk directory, press install, and you will immediately be asked to enter timezone...click then 'next' and the setup is finished.
Why is Windows 3.1 so fast? because the program calls do not have to go through more than 2 layers of APIs. Win32 in Windows 3.1 is directly executed on the hardware.
What Microsoft should do is ditch Windows completely and produce another O/S, from the ground up, in a language other than C, a language that offers protection, isolation and security through semantics and not hardware tricks; such a language will enable the seamless co-operation of software modules without expensive communication mechanisms. Microsoft research is in the right direction with the Singularity project, but most probably it will never see the light of day: managers will not be persuaded to follow that route (most probably the research guys will get a chair on their heads from the you-know-who-throws-chairs-in-Microsoft person).
PAE looks suspiciously similar to the tricks done with DOS in order to execute code that spans more than a 16-bit segment.
It just not worth it to follow that route. Go 64-bit, for a nice and clean architecture without mind-boggling tricks.
I had an Amiga. I can justify your claims.
While you used DOS to handle text editing, I was using Micro-Emacs (multiple buffers, copy-paste etc). I was using scalable fonts with a GUI.
You collected 256 color images, and I collected 4096 color images (and later 16 million color images, thanks to A1200).
You played text adventures or adventures with 16 items at most, while I was playing Shadow Of the Beast (over 400 colors on the screen, 18 levels of scrolling, screen-sized sprites, 60 frames per second, incredible digital sound).
You configured interrupts manually, I had auto-configurable zorro slots.
You restled with far/near pointers, I had 1 MB of ram to play with.
My point? you had a bad deal. Just like with betamax/vhs, the worst technology survived. My best Amiga configuration had 4 MB of RAM, an 68020 CPU, a hard disk, and I could run simultaneously the following programs: Lightwave 3D, Deluxe Paint, Hisoft C, Workbench, a web browser (albeit not as complicated as one today), an email client, a word processor, without the slightest drop in UI performance or mouse response. Even today, with a PC, sometimes Firefox brings my Intel Core Duo 2/2 GB RAM machine to a halt, even without anything else running.
"His XP system has 2GB of RAM, which he calls the "sweet spot" for that operating system"
What a load of rubbish, there is no way you need 2Gb for XP to run well. I'd love to know what he runs to think he needs this, SQL Server 2005 while playing Doom 3 maybe.
Not mentioning this is another large oversight.
I run 1Gb and 95% of the time have noticed zero increase in speed or performance from when I ran 512Mb. 2Gb for XP what a load of crap.
For mos users 512Mb is the sweet spot, any less is a disaster. For Vista I bet it's 3Gb maximum (I suspect 2Gb will be fine), while hardware vendors like to make you think you need to double each time (512Mb, 1Gb, 2Gb, 4Gb).
So the article is saying to browse the web, e-mail, a bit of DVD burning, the odd game (of which the graphics card has always been more important) you need 4Gb of RAM? I seriously doubt it, and even then imagine the cost.
Good luck finding a laptop which even supports 4Gb, from my experience most max out at 2Gb with some supporting 3Gb.
4GB ought to be enough for anyone.
While on the surface this seems like a good request, it seems to me that doing this would be more harmful to Apple's reputation than helpful. Unlike Microsoft, which (not counting peripherals) is in primarily the software market, Apple integrates their OS and hardware, so they have fewer hardware configurations to support. If they opened it up to the beige boxes of the world the percieved quality of their OS would suffer... this wouldn't "just work" like they do now.
Because programmers -- good programmers -- rely upon abstractions.
...
Supose my program has a few lines like this:
document = getDocument(url)
element = document.getElemById(id)
This is a natural way to express fetching a particular element out of a remote document. It also relies upon all kinds of abstractions. The function getDocument clearly has to set up a socket (one level of abstraction) which is built on top of packets (another level of abstraction which are implemented by manipulating other hardware registers and buffers (yet another). Even this picture is simplified, because there are multiple layers frameworks, libraries and OS apis between each level
The result is we do things that would have been practically beyond the dreams of anything we could attempt when I started out in this business twenty five years ago.
The downside is that there are many, many layers between getDocument and where the work actually gets done. If each layer relies on two abstractions, then the total number of abstractions grows O(2^n).
I've watched this phenomenon grow over the years as computer memory sizes have increased and layers of abstractions have been added to take advantage of them. Word processors in 1982, when I started in this busineess, could run in something like 32K. Now it appears that we need 200M, or roughly speaking 10,000x the memory. There is no doubt that word processors are vastly more capable, but are they 10,000x more capable -- do they make us 10,000x more productive?
The answer is that if we double the number of absractions per layer, the natural scale for looking at this is logarithmic. Log2(10,0000) = 13. By adding a dozen layers of abstraction, we have a much more reasonable looking picture assuming each layer needs roughly 2x independent abstractions to do its job. If each layer utilizes three other sets of abstractions, then we have a mere seven additional layers of abstraction producing the "bloat".
It is quite plausible we are 7-12x times more productive on a modern word processor.
Having watched this trend for many years, I often tell young programmers who are concerened with efficiency to remember this: ultimately only the top and bottom layers of abstraction matter to getting the job correctly. But once the top layer is clean as can be and reasonable, it doesn't pay to try to torture it into yielding some linear increment of time or space; at least not until you've looked at what's sandwiched between the top and bottom.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'm running Vista on a laptop with 1GB of RAM and a 1.6GHz duo processor. I'm also running the beta on a 2.6GHz hyperthreaded machine with 1GB of RAM. Neither of them have performance issues. 4GB might be nice, but I have been playing World of Warcraft on my laptop since beta with no problems.
I really don't know where these idiots get their information of what seriously sorry computer they are running, but to say that Windows Vista needs 4GB to run optimal is crap. Anyone that makes that claim needs to stick with a calculator and leave computers to the experts, or at least those of us with an IQ higher than 40.
Windows Vista runs perfectly on my system with 2GB. Change the compatibility mode to Windows XP for a few games such as Oblivion and they run fine and dandy too.
Unfortunately the day will never come when idiots stop writing articles.
That fails to consider one thing: even though 64 bits are required to go past 4 gigabytes, virtual memory means that a 32-bit OS can still use more than 4GB of memory. As long as each individual process is happy with less than 4 gigabytes, the OS can simply assign multiple <4GB chunks out of >4GB of real memory for multiple programs. The only requirement is to break away from the 32-bit PCI bus in favor of 64-bit PCI.
However, I suppose you can say that a "64-bit OS" doesn't necessarily imply a 64-bit CPU, in which case OS X 10.4 would qualify as such, even though the kernel used 32-bit code. (it supported >4GB of real memory and allowed >4GB of virtual memory for a 64-bit process) So technically, the "64-bit operating system" has already been here for almost two years in OS X, and longer in Linux. There are professional users who hit the 4GB process barrier years ago, but it will still a few years before >4GB process space is a requirement for consumer or even business users.
The reason that the 386 was such an essential requirement for Windows 95 is that process space before then was allocated in 64K-maximum chunks, if it weren't for the essential loophole of real-mode segment arithmetic. The 32-to-64 bit transition is not nearly such a hard limit.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
None of the major computer sellers offer home use PCs with XP. It's Vista only for not only Dells, but also HP/Compaq, Sony, Toshiba, etc. The only way to get XP is to go with a used, refurbished, or off lease machine, or like another person said, go to the business machine section.
If anyone needs me, I'll be in the Angry Dome.
I'm running VISTA with only 1 GB RAM and I don't seem to have any problems. I have AERO turned on. Photoshop/Illustrator seems to work fine. I'm not running any GIS software (yet) but I'd say for the casual user you won't need 4 GB. Yes please have more than the minimum (512). This is hardware people working you up to buy more hardware. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Anagrams: proof that sarcasm is not the lowest form of wit
Reduce, reuse, cycle
M$ wouldn't let me enable AERO That's not because of your RAM. It's because of your video card and driver. Try educating yourself on the requirements to run Aero.
"...Even with 1GB you are good with AERO,..." I disagree... I was running an AMD 3000+ (Barton) w/ 2X512MB and an ATI Radeon 9600SE (software OC'd to take advantage of the R350 graphics engine), and M$ wouldn't let me enable AERO. Nor could I multi-task without severe performance degradation/crashing. And this machine was rated 1.0 on the performance index, hilariously! It runs perfect on XP (which I am back to using, btw), I can play any game with ease (and full graphics!), and multi-tasking has never been an issue.
Well your hardware supports it, sounds like you have an issue with your system.
This is my morning coffee computer, running Vista as I type. AMD +2800 with 1Gb RAM and ATI Radeon 9800. And Aero runs like a champ...
My family plays CoH on this computer, and as anyone that has played it knows, it is very memory and graphics hungry - and they run CoH with Aero enabled in game, as they sometimes play with CoH in a Window on the desktop, Glass, transparency and all. They love the fact I threw Vista on this old computer as FPS is 5-10 higher than XP, and load times are 5-10x XP when traveling to new zones.
I do apologize if your 'case' is not typical, but your system is very capable of running Vista, and running it better than XP.
(Make sure you download the latest ATI drivers, and don't install any chipset drivers that were made for XP for your mainboard. I have seen users install XP mainboard chipset drivers (like from an OEM disk thinking it is needed) which do not work with the new architecture of Vista. In case you installed any drivers like this, remove them, or roll them back in the device manage.)
Also after installing the ATI drivers for your video, re-run the performance evaluation tool as they system recommends, if not your Video might still be listed as 1.0 and Aero will not enable.
Good luck...
(Caution, following is totally off topic) This reminds me of that totally awesome game called "Zork 0" I used to play on the Commodore 64. Anyone remember that?
And then ...
Dude. You are making a dunce out of yourself in public. In the context of GPU operation, if GPU memory is "virtualised" that means it is mapped into the OS memory areas (since it must be maintained in a persistent state from the perspective of non-directx 10 apps), so that the various applications which attempt to get at the "real" GPU memory can be held off until their "scheduled" time comes up at which time their individual idea of the GPU memory contents is mapped in.
That means that the overall memory usage of the OS is a sum of the GPU memory size allocated by the applications and the OS, with the actual GPU hardware containing the "current" state of the application which happens to be in the foreground. Which means that when you use Aero, the OS uses the GPU fully plus a considerable chunk of OS memory with all those currently "un-scheduled" GPU states.
This of course goes contrary to your premise, that Vista uses memory "efficiently". What is actually happening is that Vista sacrifices memory for virtualization, thus expanding the system memory usage significantly when compared to a pre-Vista situation.
In other words, WhiteWolf666 was quite right, you do not know what you are talking about.
I also suspect that as was the case with XP's prefetching, there is again a gross misconception of what exactly superfetch is doing. Prefetching used no extra RAM -- it is simply a collection of small files describing the order in which pages in an executable (executables in Windows are memory mapped) are loaded on startup, yet people were frequently advised to "turn it off to improve performance", or worse, routinely delete their prefetch cache, which was even worse than simply disabling prefetching as XP went on to regenerate it when a program was loaded.
Hi!
You seem to be looking for a Windows Vista feature list.
Do you want me to find a Windows Vista feature list?
I'm sorry, but counting those as features is what got us here in the first place.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You know what? I do still use IRC, and although I'm on Beryl now, I do use a terminal for roughly half my work (and a web browser for the other half). I do this because I'm faster that way.
But really, Flash is one of those things that just constantly pisses me off. Not that Gnash seems much better, but given the games I can play on this computer, Flash's puny little vector animations should NOT be lagging at all. Someone's trying to do a 3D engine in Flash now that I think illustrates the point perfectly -- the demos are incredibly simplistic, and the ones that start to look cool also start to slow down -- while still having WAY less going on than a game from five years ago.
Recently, I ran a test -- YouTube on Flash, then the same FLV videos (downloaded via Video Downloader) on mplayer or VLC. Both mplayer and VLC played them like I was used to -- fullscreen, with pretty much zero performance hit. Hell, I'm less than 10% CPU usage even dragging a video window around with Beryl. But in Flash, it looks MUCH worse (horrible anti-aliasing), and uses at least 50-60% CPU, sometimes significantly more.
VLC is more cross-platform than Flash, and Flash is at least ten, possibly a hundred times slower.
Flash, like Windows, embarrasses me as a software professional.
And is it irrelevant? After all, computers will just keep getting faster, right? Trouble is, as raw hardware performance approaches a certain point, a whole new class of applications opens up, or a whole new dimension for existing applications emerges. If your environment is slower, that puts you WAY behind the curve on that. So, for example, Flash has some new 3D stuff that looks about as good as, say, Half-Life, and my system is already plenty fast for Half-Life 2. I guarantee that unless we replace it with something else, AJAX will have its first 3D engine in another five or ten years.
Just imagine how cool that sounds, for a second. Open up a website, and without waiting for any third-party environment (Flash) to start up, without even needing to port anything other than Firefox, you have a fully 3D webpage -- or, for that matter, an actual MMO that just loads from visiting a website.
Or whatever excites you. Explore that concept for a few minutes -- what could you do if absolutely ANY app could be run in a browser. Some people don't like this idea, some people get so excited about it that they invent new words (AJAX, Web 2.0) for the technologies that should already make it possible.
Then think about how if the Web was at all efficient, we could've had something five or ten years ago that looks MUCH better than what we'll half-assedly do in another five or ten years.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
No, you don't. You're obviously not running Beryl, and probably not Xubuntu.
Yes, I do. Hmm, actually, if I take a screenshot while actually dragging a window, I do see it torn a bit; however, I suspect this is my video card more than anything, and in any case, it's utterly imperceptible to me until I actually take the screenshot.
Click, drag. Then middle-click. Actually works a lot better than on Windows.
Actually, it does bother me that there seem to be two different clipboards on Linux, but I find that I can middle-click-paste into ANY app except a game. In fact, the only thing that behaves inconsistently is ctrl+v, which doesn't necessarily paste the hilight, but if I use ctrl+c/ctrl+v, it's consistent everywhere that ctrl+v actually works. Which isn't everywhere, but neither is it everywhere on Windows -- last I checked, you can't ctrl+v into a DOS box (have to menu->paste).
Streams of what, as someone else said?
Streams of audio? I use ALSA, which does blend streams of audio from any number of applications -- in hardware. If I didn't have that (and chances are VERY good that you do), I'd be using things like esound, which has done the same thing in software since before Windows could do it at all -- Win98 could not play sound from more than one app source at a time, end of story.
Streams of video? I can hold the Super (Windows) key and use my mousewheel to control window translucency. So, while I can't see why you'd want to do this, I can stack as many videos as I want on top of each other and blend them, I suppose. Only exception is if I'm using XvMC, but I'm not sure anything similar for Windows exists.
And for that matter, how is a working clipboard in any way related to aero-like graphics? And if you're talking about audio streams, again, how's that related? And if you're talking about video streams, seriously dude, WTF are you trying to do?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
In reality, what you're getting for Vista is things that work. If you live in Emacs and gcc, as I do and as you appear to, yeah, Ubuntu will serve. If not...sorry, no, it won't.
So you're telling me games are also not using my video card? They certainly can break, and not just on Linux, although they generally seem to compensate for screenshots.
Ah, I see. And yet, I've always been able to paste with ctrl+c/v in any app that cares about rich text.
Your drivers don't work, sucks to be you. This isn't unheard of on Vista, either.
My ALSA works fine, anywhere I've tried to use it, including a Powerbook, if I remember.
Except when they don't (see above comment about drivers).
And if you want to do an apples-to-apples comparison, either buy them both preloaded or install them both yourself on some arbitrary "standard" box.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I've done both. You obviously haven't. The Vista installer has never failed for me. The Ubuntu installer -- not so much.
Face it, you've been shown up. You asked "what do I get?", intending to be praised by the slashbots. I told you what you got. You don't like it. Sorry, puppy, you decided to be a fool, and sometimes someone steps out of the woodwork and calls you on it.
Fair enough.
Nah, most often I'm actually curious. Given all the driver issues with nvidia, I strongly suspected it wouldn't go so well. Guess I was wrong.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Dude. You are making a dunce out of yourself in public. In the context of GPU operation, if GPU memory is "virtualised" that means it is mapped into the OS memory areas (since it must be maintained in a persistent state from the perspective of non-directx 10 apps), so that the various applications which attempt to get at the "real" GPU memory can be held off until their "scheduled" time comes up at which time their individual idea of the GPU memory contents is mapped in.
Did you even read the links?
Vista maps the GPU and system RAM used for 'video' together, so by using the new WDDM model and a AGP or PCI/e bus, there is no need for Vista to shove the System used RAM for video back into the GPU RAM space in order to let the GPU use it or draw with it. It can stay in System RAM, and the GPU sees it as native GPU RAM.
I think this is the bigger point you are missing.
Which means that when you use Aero, the OS uses the GPU fully plus a considerable chunk of OS memory with all those currently "un-scheduled" GPU states.
What is actually happening is that Vista sacrifices memory for virtualization, thus expanding the system memory usage significantly when compared to a pre-Vista situation.
99.9% of desktop users that have 128MB on their Video card will not see this effect, the chance that you have enough active Windows open to eat into system RAM is not as likely as you might think.
Now with games, this WILL happen; however, in gaming what is more beneficial to you in terms of performance? Loading the game textures off the Hard Drive continuously, or letting the system pretend you have more GPU RAM so the textures are 'virtualized' in system RAM?
If you know anything about gaming, yanking crap off the hard drive compared to being able to use another small chunk of system RAM to hold them is going to yield a far better experience. And this is also superior to just caching them, as the Game is not having to load/request the textures continously. Instead the Game sees the textures as already loaded in GPU space and can use them as if they were sitting on the Video card itself.
Vista will move textures to the GPU RAM if they are in high performance use. So some of the initial calls to a texture will be virtualized and used from System RAM, but if the texture is frequently used and another texture is not being used, Vista will flip them out so the higher priority texture will then be sitting in GPU RAM, which is faster.
This is also why you can throw your texture quality to the roof in Vista and not see a massive performance loss, as the Game is not continually having to grab/load textures to create a scene, instead the game/application sees them as sitting in GPU RAM whether they are in the real GPU RAM or in System RAM in 'virtualized' GPU RAM space.
Virtualization is a Good thing...
Yeah, but you still can copy only text (in multiple, sometimes incompatible, ways). And you have about 20 different "open file" dialog boxes, of which at least 5 are broken. And unless you count Xamp, there still is no good, simple default MP3 player installed. And to get it working I still need to program my monitor into the system, and thats for my 20", my 17" wide screen won't even work.
I hate Microsoft, they are simply bad, but all those things you mention, well, sometimes they don't mean squat.
Except of course that this is impossible with any GPU using dedicated on-board RAM. The whole point of on-board RAM is that its bandwidth is much, much wider then that of even the PCI/e bus. Also because system buses are prone to being bottlenecks hampering application performance when large numbers of large textures are involved, most higher end GPUs use texture compression algorithms coupled with GPU-bound hardware decompression schemes, thus effectively precluding any attempts at using system RAM for such activities. In other words what you are describing is only possible on cheesy, sub-$100 "GPU"s with laughable 3D performance.
See above.
This assumes that no other 3D apps/applets/what-not are in use (thus no virtualisation of any kind is in effect) and also that some of the textures used are not duplicated in system RAM, as it is usually the case with complex 3D scenes since textures tend to expand rapidly after decompression in hardware. The moment even one non-DirectX-10 3D app in use, the whole scheme blows apart and up to 128MB has to be virtualised per application in addition to the OS.
This of course is completely irrelevant from the point of view of analysis of Vista since all current games optimise texture loading by caching them in system RAM. They also set up complicated, fine-tuned rendering pipelines and what not. If anything, the virtualisation will screw them up (as is the case with most games now) since the designers were not expecting to be sharing the GPU and subsquently optimised for that case. Vista is introducing unexpected timing and memory/disk access behaviour which causes most of these games to malfunction. Just check out the various gaming forums for all the moaning that is coming from Vista users. Turning off Aero is pretty much a pre-requisite to getting most of the current games to run with any reasonable stability.
See above
This, naturally, is complete nonsense.
As I pointed out, swapping textures into the GPU RAM from system RAM is anything but "high performance".
Also, Vista has no business messing with "optimising" per-application textures since it is impossible for an OS to estimate the usage patterns an
> I feel like it's 10 years ago with the ASM guys spouting off about how C++ sucks because you can write ASM that runs faster.
.NET and everything to do with new features and the amount of graphical candy the graphical system offers.
I do mostly Java programming, so that comment is ironic.
I was actually questioning the parent poster's assumptions. He was saying the extra memory and CPU are needed to support C# apps, which there are very little to none to support the main Vista OS applications (GUI or not). In other words, the reason for the added horse power has nothing to do with
- sigs are for wimps.
The time taken to load pages from hard drive should not be thought of as nearly free. Although there is relatively little time spent communicating with the hard disk controller hardware, when the DMA kicks in to fill the memory from hard disk, the DMA eats memory cycles like a crazy monkey. When the DMA reaches terminal count, interrupts take place and that takes more time.
I remember a show-and-tell in 7th or 8th grade in 1968 or 9, when a kid talked about memory at $1K/Kb. I didn't know WTF that was all about, and certainly can't recall what kind of device he might have been building back then.
...
Yes. $1K in 1968 dollars for one part in a kid's project. What can I say? I grew up in Beverly Hills, a claim this is disputed only by those who claim I never grew up at all, or in any case not until I was over 30. It was the poorest part of town, but things were weird even there
To err is human. To forgive is good system design.
> 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.
We were discussing on-board GPU RAM which is usually a custom arrangement wholly different from the dynamic RAM types used as main system memory. Some GPUs even use static RAM.
So essentially you are comparing apples and oranges.
Well, you might have picked an imaginary nit this time....
I guess I just don't see it as "free". Yes, getting rid of something that's already in memory and not used is free. But getting it there in the first place isn't. I guess I don't see the trade-off......this isn't like a normal processor cache as I see it. It's not, pretty fast memory to really fast memory on or near the chip (i guess near doesn't exist anymore, but...) It's disk to pretty fast memory. Now, HDs are pretty fast these days, but I still don't see that it's comparable.
I may be wrong.
Takes time? From what?
The precaching happens when the machine is idle. That it occurs less-than-instantaneously is does not indicate that it is computationally expensive in any meaningful way.
Computers are devilishly fast, and on the desktop, they still spend almost all of their time waiting for their operator to catch up. It might as well spend some of that idle horsepower doing something which might save some time for its human operator.
Kid-proof tablet..
It is free because it costs nothing to use a disk which would otherwise be idle.
It is free because the CPU time needed to perform these actions is meaningless on a modern machine, and occurs when the CPU would otherwise be idle.
It is free because of the massive trend toward dedicated point-to-point connections like SATA, which alleviate concerns of bus contention.
In short, it is free because it lacks identifiable cost.
And the benefits are profound. Caching has done more to accelerate the modern computing experience than anything else, and the notion of caching things from disk in advance of needing them is the obvious extension of that.
(When I ran a BBS on a 10MHz XT, 16 years ago, I had a very carefully organized RAM disk on an 8-bit ISA card. It was populated at every boot to contain all of the most-used external program executables and certain key data sets which a BBS user would be likely to need during their call. Consequently, the machine -usually- felt more like a zippy 386 than a lowly XT, and the whole BBS was far more responsive than most. It was not free, because it required specialized hardware and special practices. Vista accomplishes the same goal without special hardware, and without intervention on my part: Free.)
Kid-proof tablet..
Texture caching is the responsibility of the driver. Back in the days of 3DFX and their Glide API, the programmer was responsible for texture cache management, not so with Direct3D and OpenGL.
You say I have no idea what I'm talking about, then you go on to describe the EXACT THING I was talking about.
The WDDM is the new DRIVER MODEL in Vista, and Vista uses new tools opened through the driver to implement a GPU Task and GPU RAM scheduler.
And the whole point of the WDDM and Vista is that NO APPLICATION has 100% control of the GPU at any time, as GPU architectures assumed in the past. This is lower than DirectX, OpenGL, etc and DOES happen at the Vista and Vista driver level.
This is why I can run a DirectX app and OpenGL app with full hardware acceleration in Transparent windows on a Vista desktop with an animated video playing behind it. Sure the composer is creating the final image, but the GPU is being used by not only the composer, but the two applications, and both applications assume they have full scheduling and control of the GPU. But, they no longer do, Vista does give the GPU pre-emptive tasking abilities.
Vista also adds native multi-processor GPU support, so old applications can scale across GPU cores.
This will even be more important with DirectX10, and ONE reason it requires Vista, as DirectX10 is built based on these concepts and brings to the table GPUs being used for physics, etc without having to worry about an application locking the GPU to render a scene.
Everyone just needs to go read the MS/ATI/NVidia docs on this.