The latest news about de-planetizing Pluto has got me bummed. In my misspent youth, the story about how Clyde Tombaugh discovered a planet was one of those moments that steered me towards science and technology, along with watching Mr. Spock fight Tribbles, decoding Clarke’s 2001, and trying out the experiments from Mr. Wizard. While I can understand the decision, it is a lot like telling Columbus that he landed on some Caribbean island instead of the U.S. of A.
Well, let’s not dwell on Pluto but move on to something else to get really depressed about. If you are considering getting more experience with the latest beta of Windows Vista, you will find that your graphics horsepower is woefully inadequate for running this operating system.
I have found from my tests that you will need a discrete graphics processor if you are going to have any kind of productivity with Vista at all. This is probably going to be most noticeable with your laptop, which traditionally has lagged behind desktops in terms of graphics firepower. Why is this important? Vista treats itself like one big video game, with pixel shaders, anti-aliasing, and the like. Everything on the screen is now considered a 3D polygon that can be manipulated by the OS.
While there are some obvious reasons for Microsoft to offer these enhancements as part of its OS, particularly for the gaming generation, there are some non-obvious ones as well. Aero — what the new Windows interface design is called — makes Vista more reliable by separating the screen drawing commands more completely from the applications control. Many of the crashes of XP were caused by this lack of separation, and one application stepping on another one’s screen real estate. The testing that I have done indicates that Vista will help fix these problems. But the fix comes at a high premium.
The wisest course of action is to wait and postpone buying any new graphics card until Vista ships next year. If you can’t wait, then make sure your card has at least 256 MB of on-board video memory, and see what your vendor says about supporting Direct X v10. This is what will guarantee Vista functionality. And if you are making a major PC buy, consider how you will deal with your video subsystem, and think about getting even more video RAM.
Yes, 256 MB of video RAM is going to be the starting place. That is a heck of a lot of RAM for a general business computer, and chances are most of your corporation’s PCs have far less installed.
I tested the hypothesis that having an add-in graphics processor is a necessary condition for running the latest beta 2 of Windows Vista, by testing two identically configured PCs, but one with a plug-in Nvidia GPU and the other using the Intel integrated graphics on the motherboard. I found that without the extra GPU, you are wasting your time and your own productivity. While the experience with an integrated graphics card is acceptable, it is borderline acceptable and most users will become easily frustrated over the limitations imposed by Vista on graphics-poor PCs when trying to run multiple applications. By multiple, I mean more than one: Vista runs a lot of stuff under the covers, much more than XP.
What this means is that users running the on-board Intel graphics will not get the performance and productivity gains that they would have with a discreet graphics card. Intel will try to obfuscate this message in the coming months, and the major PC vendors have already begun plastering “Vista-ready” logos all over their Web sites, but ignore these messages, and find out how much video RAM you can really afford and make sure you get a plug-in card and not anything onboard too.
On a new Dell that I bought about a month ago that was “Vista-ready” it came with a big 8 MB of shared video-RAM. Going into the BIOS, I could see that my choices were keeping this setting, or dropping the video RAM down to 1 MB. Some choice. You might have similar circumstances, if you even know how to fiddle with your BIOS, or download a new one that might help make further adjustments. As a result, Vista runs slowly on this PC, and I don’t see any of the 3D treats that I could have gotten had I installed a better video card.
Microsoft has this mickey-mouse assessment tool that will grade your system and tell you how it is expected to perform with Vista: don’t even bother with the download, because it is easy to game this tool and have it report just about anything.
I’ll have more to say about Vista in the coming months, but you might as well know the bad news now about the add-in graphics scene as you try to console yourselves about the whole Pluto thing.
Regarding Vista graphics, some of the most important bits about it that are often underappreciated:
It’s not just the size of the GPU or GPU RAM, it’s also the connectivity. You really want a PCI Express Bus not an AGP bus machine.
Cheap-ass notebooks with UMA graphics will have a problem. Decent notebooks (the Pavilion 8110us I’m using) will run Aero if not Aero Glass ok. (They’ve changed the names of the User Experiences but you know what I mean.)
You’re right about the MS tool for determining if your machine is Vista ready. The one built into Vista is just about as confusing and will cause all sorts of angry messages about how “this machine is crap, it only gives me a 4 on the Vista Speed Test!”
Vista will finally allow the nearsighted to turn their resolution up to the native screen res, and scale all their old apps so the eentsy raster icons are big enough to see. As screen res’s go up, your icons shouldn’t shrink.
–Alex
In short, Vista is a real pig, a very big one. A bigger pig than
XP. I am still running lean and mean Windows 2000, which is nice
and responsive and meets all my business needs.
I recall that Windows 3.1 was called the “Hardware Sales Act of 1992
(or whenever it came out)”. Vista represents collusion between
Microsoft and the major name brand computer vendors to sell ever more
and more hardware, to render obsolete what is in place today, and to
keep the computer industry economy heated up. Even with many
hardware prices dropping in terms of cost per GHz or MB or GB, Vista
will still require a pretty hefty and expensive computer to run
acceptably. It is the “Hardware Sales Act of 2007”. If people
truly want to run Vista, they should simply stop buying computers
until Vista is shipping on new systems. That is perhaps the only
way buyers can be sure a computer will run Vista, and, even so,
possibly not very well. In the early days of XP, Dell and HP both
shipped a lot of XP computers with a pathetic 128MB of memory, a
totally stupid move which alienated a lot of buyers, but “price
competitive”. I do not deliver an XP machine with less than 512MB
of memory. Will we see the same vendor stupidity with Vista? Of
course, if people stopped buying computers right now to wait for
Vista, the industry would be in the toilet. So vendors promote
inadequate computers as “Vista ready”. Wait until buyers line up to
buy Vista some January midnight, then go home and try to install and
use it. But the vendors are between the rock and the hard
spot. I’ll bet, just bet, that Microsoft releases Vista, bugs,
warts and all, around Thanksgiving, in time for computers with Vista
to show up for Xmas sales.
I guess I’ll have to laugh at all this foolishness and make a few
bucks when prople bring me their non-performing computers to fix or
upgrade. This really is a silly business… Ben Myers