When will AERO be useful?
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Russell Jones wrote:
What doesn't make sense to me is that they haven't just produced a simple 2D effect for the windows. 2D is a subset of 3D so it should be a simple task to provide a 2D desktop using 3D hardware while it is obviously a highly intensive task to provide 3D using 2D hardware. Just because they have the ability to use 3D acceleration why did they feel the need to use frosted glass effects?
hehehe, you obviously have never been on a committe for anything. ;) Lets say the programming team comes up with a new invention, 3D accelerated desktop (forget someone else did so first), that saves a good 60-80% of the time rendering the desktop. What happens? do you accelerate it and send it out exactly the same as before but faster? Nawwwww.... the customer was accustomed to the speed before, so lets add this, add that, that would be cool, yeah, I like that, hey can you do this, how about that? Pretty soon you have a camel where you wanted a horse. :) Aero is the camel where the horse should be. :)
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
that's so true. I fully understand the need to produce crazy effects for marketing purposes but surely it should have been implemented in such a way that my old PC will run it and get some benefits. If MS want me to spend £200 pounds on Vista do they really believe I want to spend another wedge of cash just to run it? It seems that supporting old machines so they run at a similar speed to the ones before would be a good idea. I ran XP with the duplo front-end turned off when it first came out and it was the same speed as Win2k give or take. In fact I never got round to turning the flufy gfx back on as it just seemed to eat real estate for no reason. Vista however runs like a stoned 3 legged pony on a machine that is less than 6 months old because the video card doesn't have the right kind of 3d acceleration. Had MS provided a 3D accelerated basic theme the video card would probably have made up for the crap performance of the rest of the OS and I wouldn't be working out when i'm going to have time to upgrade back to XP. Russ
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AlexCode wrote:
The Windows+Tab is just nice to see but how many times do you actually use it while you're working?
Never and I've never actually got to use it only because my keyboard doesn't seem to support it and I'm not giving up my keyboard for any feature short of a miraculous one.
Modo vincis, modo vinceris.
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that's so true. I fully understand the need to produce crazy effects for marketing purposes but surely it should have been implemented in such a way that my old PC will run it and get some benefits. If MS want me to spend £200 pounds on Vista do they really believe I want to spend another wedge of cash just to run it? It seems that supporting old machines so they run at a similar speed to the ones before would be a good idea. I ran XP with the duplo front-end turned off when it first came out and it was the same speed as Win2k give or take. In fact I never got round to turning the flufy gfx back on as it just seemed to eat real estate for no reason. Vista however runs like a stoned 3 legged pony on a machine that is less than 6 months old because the video card doesn't have the right kind of 3d acceleration. Had MS provided a 3D accelerated basic theme the video card would probably have made up for the crap performance of the rest of the OS and I wouldn't be working out when i'm going to have time to upgrade back to XP. Russ
Russell Jones wrote:
I fully understand the need to produce crazy effects for marketing purposes but surely it should have been implemented in such a way that my old PC will run it and get some benefits.
Surely you don't really believe that? :) Microsoft is in the Operating System business, but a large market comes from new hardware vendors selling Vista on new machines. Just as XP ran slow on machines of that age, so too Vista runs slow on machines only a little older. Graphics card capability ranges from the cheap to the expensive, from the weak to the powerful. And sometimes the equation isn't clear. We just had a customer buy the quadros, but not the highest end one for $4500 (that would be rediculous right?), but instead of the high end Geforce for $600 they bought a low-end Quadro for $1000 and actually got lower performance for more money. Mass market cards in the $100 to $250 range are the most popular, but also are not very capable. Vista could have been done in directX 9, but this would not sell as many new graphics cards. It could have been written with cooperative to minimal threading or even non-interupted thread-like tasking for some operations. But that would not sell new multi-core processors. But two things we have to keep in memory also: Multi-core was late, Vista was meant to reach this environment in its mainstream which is happening now, not when it was released then. Sure it was already out, but it wasn't bleeding down the line to the mainstream as much as it is now. Multi-core will grow, Vista must be capable, as my software is too, to handle well beyond 4 cores. Vista must survive efficiently to 16 and maybe 32 cores until the next OS is released. Both single core and massive-core is hard to build compatible models for. I have struggled for years and finally gave up. I moved from 16 processors to dual processors, but never made it to one processor for my software. Now with multi-core here, I have to expand back the other direction. Vista can't change as often as my product does, so they have to be ready now, for the cores to come. And last, as I have admitted, I am partly to blame. The bridge to OpenGL and other graphical frameworks embedded into the render-to-texture pipeline of Aero, reduced speed. It was a last minute "fix" due to market pressure, and Microsoft did it against their better judgement and did it in such a way that speed was decreased between the Betas that implimented this newer model and the one before that
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Russell Jones wrote:
I fully understand the need to produce crazy effects for marketing purposes but surely it should have been implemented in such a way that my old PC will run it and get some benefits.
Surely you don't really believe that? :) Microsoft is in the Operating System business, but a large market comes from new hardware vendors selling Vista on new machines. Just as XP ran slow on machines of that age, so too Vista runs slow on machines only a little older. Graphics card capability ranges from the cheap to the expensive, from the weak to the powerful. And sometimes the equation isn't clear. We just had a customer buy the quadros, but not the highest end one for $4500 (that would be rediculous right?), but instead of the high end Geforce for $600 they bought a low-end Quadro for $1000 and actually got lower performance for more money. Mass market cards in the $100 to $250 range are the most popular, but also are not very capable. Vista could have been done in directX 9, but this would not sell as many new graphics cards. It could have been written with cooperative to minimal threading or even non-interupted thread-like tasking for some operations. But that would not sell new multi-core processors. But two things we have to keep in memory also: Multi-core was late, Vista was meant to reach this environment in its mainstream which is happening now, not when it was released then. Sure it was already out, but it wasn't bleeding down the line to the mainstream as much as it is now. Multi-core will grow, Vista must be capable, as my software is too, to handle well beyond 4 cores. Vista must survive efficiently to 16 and maybe 32 cores until the next OS is released. Both single core and massive-core is hard to build compatible models for. I have struggled for years and finally gave up. I moved from 16 processors to dual processors, but never made it to one processor for my software. Now with multi-core here, I have to expand back the other direction. Vista can't change as often as my product does, so they have to be ready now, for the cores to come. And last, as I have admitted, I am partly to blame. The bridge to OpenGL and other graphical frameworks embedded into the render-to-texture pipeline of Aero, reduced speed. It was a last minute "fix" due to market pressure, and Microsoft did it against their better judgement and did it in such a way that speed was decreased between the Betas that implimented this newer model and the one before that
A lot of programmers seem to forget that in many cases marketing's job is to show potential customers that the company has the products they want. In other words I as a typical consumer enjoy the 21st century aspects of windows in Vista, I like aero, I think it looks cool and I don't really give a crap about the underlying technical aspects unless they cross my development path negatively (which they never do). Microsoft didn't make aero to piss off programmers, it made aero because it found that it's customers wanted it.
Modo vincis, modo vinceris.
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Well... for now is just cute... In fact it's just cutter than XP. How many of you would like to have something like these functionalities? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC5uEe5OzNQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYsxaMyFV2Y&NR=1 what's the use of Aero?! I only see some use on the taskbar preview and the alt+tab preview. The Windows+Tab is just nice to see but how many times do you actually use it while you're working? I can say that I NEVER use it... really... NEVER! and I even have a mouse with a shortcut button for it. Is it impossible for 3rd party to create new/useful desktop enhancements on Vista? Thanks! Alex
You might as well ask: When will red cars be more useful than plain black ones? This is marketing 101, Microsoft does market research like nearly everyone else, they know for certain that their customers and potential customers on average want a cooler looking windows. They've probably mocked up many different UI's and focus grouped them. Got a lot of feedback from ordinary users of windows. Probably a lot of business users in there. Programmers can bitch all they want but the market has spoken and will continue to whether we like it or not.
Modo vincis, modo vinceris.
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Jim Crafton wrote:
Because of this, IMHO, idiotic and childish decision people have to to manually upgrade to nvidia or ATI drivers after they install a distro, which is a complete waste of time.
Used Vista lately? None of the machines i've installed it on can do the Aero stuff on a base install - and only one out of three has been able to at all so far, even when upgraded to the latest-and-greatest OEM drivers. Heck, using OS-blessed video drivers has been a bad idea (performance-wise, if nothing else) for as long as i can recall; i suspect it's just a function of how video hardware is developed and released.
every night, i kneel at the foot of my bed and thank the Great Overseeing Politicians for protecting my freedoms by reducing their number, as if they were deer in a state park. -- Chris Losinger, Online Poker Players?
I have three models of Dell systems and an Acer laptop. The Acer laptop is the only computer I have listed as Vista Capable. All of my systems run Aero out of the box. The lowest model Dell uses an nVidia FX 5200 card, the next model Dell has an ATi X300, the top model Dell is an ATi X1300 and the Acer is an Intel eXtreme 950. The two lowest Dells and the Acer use shared RAM (up to 128 mb total -- the desktops have some physical VRAM), the top end Dell is 256 mb on the card. Everything is using the default drivers from Vista. :) Now, I haven't tried installing the actual nVidia or ATi drivers, but so far no problems with the drivers I have from Vista. The Intel drivers I'm using came with the laptop's restore CD, though the drivers included with Vista work for the most part (some image corruption at times that go away on screen refresh -- resolved by the Acer drivers). Flynn
If we can't corrupt the youth of today,
the adults of tomorrow will be no fun... -
Well... for now is just cute... In fact it's just cutter than XP. How many of you would like to have something like these functionalities? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC5uEe5OzNQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYsxaMyFV2Y&NR=1 what's the use of Aero?! I only see some use on the taskbar preview and the alt+tab preview. The Windows+Tab is just nice to see but how many times do you actually use it while you're working? I can say that I NEVER use it... really... NEVER! and I even have a mouse with a shortcut button for it. Is it impossible for 3rd party to create new/useful desktop enhancements on Vista? Thanks! Alex
Aero is just the "theme" in use on Vista. The real engine is DWM or Desktop Window Manager. Aero Requires DWM. DWM can do a lot of things that Vista doesn't currently make much use of. For example, a few people have created MacOS-like "expose" tools[^] for it. Also, check out DeskSpace 3D[^], but I don't think it uses DWM. There are also some nice projects here on cp, such as this[^] Also, Microsoft did a demo[^] a number of years ago demonstrating technology like Wobbly windows. They ultimately decided not to include it in Vista because, frankly, it's just not useful and business users demand a more professional look. I think it's only a matter of time before someone comes up with a Beryl-like UI that takes full advantage of DWM.
-- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?
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I have three models of Dell systems and an Acer laptop. The Acer laptop is the only computer I have listed as Vista Capable. All of my systems run Aero out of the box. The lowest model Dell uses an nVidia FX 5200 card, the next model Dell has an ATi X300, the top model Dell is an ATi X1300 and the Acer is an Intel eXtreme 950. The two lowest Dells and the Acer use shared RAM (up to 128 mb total -- the desktops have some physical VRAM), the top end Dell is 256 mb on the card. Everything is using the default drivers from Vista. :) Now, I haven't tried installing the actual nVidia or ATi drivers, but so far no problems with the drivers I have from Vista. The Intel drivers I'm using came with the laptop's restore CD, though the drivers included with Vista work for the most part (some image corruption at times that go away on screen refresh -- resolved by the Acer drivers). Flynn
If we can't corrupt the youth of today,
the adults of tomorrow will be no fun...I've got an acer with i945 gfx. It runs glass but with a slight but noticeable level of latency. It never reached the level of figuring out how to turn it off though. Intel raised the bar significantly with the chipset that came after the 950. Several times faster than the 6100 that was AMDs bottom end, and prior to that the 6100 was several times faster than intel's onboard gfx. I haven't had an opportunity to play with one of them though.
-- If you view money as inherently evil, I view it as my duty to assist in making you more virtuous.
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I've got an acer with i945 gfx. It runs glass but with a slight but noticeable level of latency. It never reached the level of figuring out how to turn it off though. Intel raised the bar significantly with the chipset that came after the 950. Several times faster than the 6100 that was AMDs bottom end, and prior to that the 6100 was several times faster than intel's onboard gfx. I haven't had an opportunity to play with one of them though.
-- If you view money as inherently evil, I view it as my duty to assist in making you more virtuous.
Haven't noticed a lot of difference between my Acer and my mid-level Dell (our file and media server). However, both are using shared memory cards. The Intel has 32 mb onboard and can share up to 128 mb, same with the ATi X300 in the Dell. Both are running Vista Ultimate with 2 gb ram. Flynn
If we can't corrupt the youth of today,
the adults of tomorrow will be no fun... -
Aero is just the "theme" in use on Vista. The real engine is DWM or Desktop Window Manager. Aero Requires DWM. DWM can do a lot of things that Vista doesn't currently make much use of. For example, a few people have created MacOS-like "expose" tools[^] for it. Also, check out DeskSpace 3D[^], but I don't think it uses DWM. There are also some nice projects here on cp, such as this[^] Also, Microsoft did a demo[^] a number of years ago demonstrating technology like Wobbly windows. They ultimately decided not to include it in Vista because, frankly, it's just not useful and business users demand a more professional look. I think it's only a matter of time before someone comes up with a Beryl-like UI that takes full advantage of DWM.
-- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?