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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.
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!!
was gonna say, you toss 4g in a 32bit box you will only see about 3gig. unless you go 64bit, but then you will see even less driver support available
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
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..
More RAM == Better!
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eleven plus two / twelve plus one
Display write and a 3270 emulator.
means more CASHing!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"640,000 DIMM slots ought to be enough for anyone"
It has nothing to do with RAM so I may be offtopic, but I beg to differ.
I run two boxes x64. One is an Intel P4 with EMT and the other an AMD Athlon x64. Both run x64 OS and both x64 and x32 programs. I have two devices that will not run on x64 out all my components. An old Linksys wirelss adapter and an old soundcard.
I understand the reason these drivers don't work is due to Microsofts changes to both Networking and sound processing in Windows. So honestly IMO the gap in support between 32 and 64 is dramatically closing.
If a million people jumped off a cliff, it'd only be a short time until I landed in a nice soft mountain of bodies.
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.
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.
Ignore the FUD. We run it on everything going back to 3.5 year old P4's with crappy video cards and 512MB of ram. Does full Aero work? No. Does it work fine for Office/daily business use: Yes.
My home machine is a 18 month old P4 3.2GHZ with an upgraded (for games, $125) video card, 1gb ram, and Vista runs with full effects.
Even under the Macbook Pro (C2D, stock ram) it runs fine under paralells. You will never get Aero under virtual machines, but the OS works fine.
Ever feel like you are driving the getaway car?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Then you'll be fine. Honestly, people, it's not that much different than XP. I have to assume that most of the people who are repeating these claims about RAM usage simply haven't booted Vista yet. I have 2GB on my Vista machine but that's mainly for VMWare and Photoshop work. It ran fine with 1GB (though there was a slight "Windows Experience Index" improvement when I added the second gig, probably because of the aforementioned caching).
Breakfast served all day!
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.
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.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
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.)
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
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
Almost all intel processors, starting with the pentium pro, support PAE, which allows up to 64Gb of RAM. This was supported only by the Advanced and Datacenter server editions of Win2k, and by the enterprise version of Win2k3. Unix operating systems, however, have very good support for PAE. For a single application to be able to use more that 4Gb of RAM, though, it needs to be properly written to be PAE aware. Without using PAE, the maximum memory available for a single app is 3Gb on Windows.
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();
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.
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.
PAE
PAE on Windows
While I know you were talking specifically to the desktop oriented versions of Windows 32-bit, there is obviously code there somewhere to do it.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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! --
Since most environments run more than one process, they can take advantage of the extra ram assuming their total amount of allocated space is above 4GB. For that matter, I used to run a 32bit version of BSD 5 years ago that ran on a Dual PIII system with 8GB RAM. Basically we ran 2 caching processes of 4GB each, and some smaller processes that added up to a memory load of 8GB.
What you get with a 64bit operating system is a theoretical 64bit address space for each and every process. In reality different processor architectures offer somewhere between 40 and 48 bits worth of physical address space (Good for almost a Petabyte of RAM). 64bit is really only useful for a few VERY large applications such as Database, a few imaging processing apps, and some massive number crunching... Your average desktop OS application has no need for more than 32 bits, and in fact most of us would actually have slower machines with a 32bit user space
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
However, that's only if your enable /3GB switch in your boot.ini. Oh, and then if you want applications like SQL server that are PAE aware, don't expect them to turn that feature on automatically. Oh, but then SQL server 2000 takes all it's memory up at the beginning, so if you want it to have 7 GB, it's going to always have 7GB. I guess it's nice they fixed it in SQL Server 2005. I'm not too familiar with running enterprise Linux systems, but does Linux/Unix have all these crazy limitations and set up issues? What's involved in getting an opteron with 64 GB of RAM and using it for something like PostgreSQL? Is it as difficult as setting up SQL server to use memory above 2 GB?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Yeah, for a single prgram- the vast majority of programs out there don't hit that limit. What the GP is saying is that the limit of total system RAM is 4 GB on a 32-bit OS. So if the article was talking about 32-bit windows, the headline could read "max out your RAM" rather than "4 GB is the sweet spot."
(* 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.
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.
I agree. I just built a new Athlon 64 system and out of my internal components, only my TV card doesn't work on XP x64.....and that's only with the manufacturer's drivers. I have a less than optimal workaround for it, so i guess you could say I'm 100%.
If you ignore the webcam that's under my desk somewhere that I forgot about and only noticed when I started plugging all the USB cables back in. No lose.
hardware devices can nab space in the address space for memory mapped I/O. Usually this leaves about a 1GB hole. If your CPU can only address 32-bits that means you can only have 3GB of usable memory.
With PAE or 64-bit long mode you can see more but that requires the OS to know about it and your BIOS to perform a memory remap.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.)
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
If you are using Vista x32, do *not* buy more than 3 GB of memory or you will be just throwing your money away.
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)
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
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
Woah, woah. That's a lot of assumptions, all grossly incorrect.
No.
Let's pretend that I am a "developer who runs Vista to write and test software." Regardless of my occupation, I consider it disrespectful when you put words into my mouth. First, I would never recommend a product that I didn't think stood on its own merits. Second, I can think of very few circumstances where XP would cease to be a platform I would need to test for within the next five years, regardless of how many people I personally encouraged to adopt Vista.
Your comment is a leading question designed to prove your point that Vista is crap and I am a shill. I have a hard time understanding where such vilification comes from that you would attempt to discredit me, and my opinion, without any sound rationale.
In fact, I am a developer, although not for Vista specifically. As a professional in my field, I believe I can discern whether or not a product I am using is "good" or not. To be fair, I did not upgrade, I bought a new PC with Vista pre-installed. I also will not be upgrading my XP machine to Vista. However, I am very satisfied with Vista as a product in and of itself. It performs well all of the tasks that I require of it.
Would I recommend Vista to others? It depends on the individual and their requirements. In general, I believe that operating systems, and most software tools, should be evaluated without respect to partisanship. In this case, I do not care whether or not Microsoft made Vista. It is a fine product in most respects, although it is not without its flaws. I believe it will also continue to get better.
Should people shy away from it? No. If a new computer comes with Vista, keep it. It does its job, and does it well.
Should people upgrade? Probably not, unless they require specific features found only in Vista. For the average user, there isn't enough value over and above XP. However, as Vista gains marketshare, and as Vista-only products are developed, that will change.
In any case, there is a learning curve with Vista, but I do not believe that should stop people from adopting the product. If that were the case, I would never recommend Linux, ever. As for the increased hardware requirements, this is not unusual, and the same rationale that has always applied to Windows 1.0, 2.0, 286, 386, 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 98SE, ME, NT 3.1, NT 3.5, NT 3.51, NT 4.0, 2000, and XP apply here. As for the problems that Vista seems to have, this is normal for a fresh product. This will undoubtedly improve as the product matures. Maybe this is a reason to hold off adopting Vista for now, but there are many benefits of Vista that may account for its drawbacks, depending on the willingness of the customer to put up with a few rough edges.
I am trying to present a balanced point of view that looks as Vista in a realistic, pragmatic light. I'm not promoting Vista exclusively over other vendors' products. There is a place for Linux, Mac OS, and even other operating systems as well, depending on the customer's requirements. I'm not married to Microsoft. But neither do I think Vista is crap.
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..
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.
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.
Your understanding of the LDDM (WGL, or whatever the heck you want to call it) is grossly oversimplified and vastly fanboyish.
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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.
"...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
The latter is, the former isn't.
320 x 200 x 4 bpp (bits per pixel) is 32 kB. However, the C64 had 16 colors only in low-res (160x200) - so it's 16 kB. At least afair. I was too young to care about the exact specs back then.
Expanding both X and Y-resolution and even colour, makes the juice required exponential..
Not exponential, but with O^2. Doubling the X and Y resoluting quadruples the memory requirement, tripling the resolution requires nine times the memory (if it were exponential, it would require 16x the memory).
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.
There are editors with that functionality on DOS. And there is GEOS for DOS, which is a multitasking OS/shell with scalable fonts. (GEOS supposedly uses DOS only for filesystem access.)
A1200 still suffers from inherent limitations of the Amiga architecture; only 2MB RAM accessible to the custom chips.
Also you couldn't do HAM Animation without using up the CPU, and you couldn't do it fast enough for video, so the 8bpp mode on the PC (when VGA came along) was superior for most purposes to the Amiga, aside from the bitblt and such routines.
And still the same boring platformer play. And really lousy collision detection. And a one-button joystick, sigh. Some games I found more impressive included Powerdrome and even Blood Money, which is a pretty standard fly-n-shooter. Also Indianapolis 500; the Amiga 500 experience was much like the $4,000 386 experience.
Amiga sound back in those days was 4 channel and 22kHz, much more impressive than PC (Adlib, FM synthesis, whee!) but still annoying :)
Still, sound was one of the best things about the Amiga. MOD files are still neat.
This is THE best thing about the Amiga, on top of the hardware-level autoconfig there's the fact that AmigaDOS is a microkernel-based system where drivers are user space processes. The driver could be just another program, stored in ROM on the card.
The Amiga was destined to die because custom chips don't scale. You have to make new custom silicon to take advantage of modern processors. I mean, that's why cpublit exists; if you have a decent processor in your OCS machine (which in Amiga-land is like, 25MHz) the CPU is faster at doing a bitblit than the custom chips. Even if Commodore hadn't been mismanaged into oblivion the Amiga still had no chance to survive.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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