Vista

[amitst]

Talk about dragging things way off topic... just answer the man.

Yes it can work under vista.

[neofyte]

Talk about dragging things way off topic... just answer the man.

Yes it can work under vista.

Thank you

[xenofur]

kaetemi, mithur, i suggest reading this: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/p ... _cost.html

regarding the eye candy: first off, it decreases usability by using up valuable screen estate, some of us are still using 10x7.
secondly, great, it uses the gfx card, but tell me, why the heck would i want my gfx card in high power mode all the time? my power bill is big enough each month.
lastly, i have 2 gb of ram and i still am short all the time, why the heck should i want something that wastes even more of it?

[mithur]

secondly, great, it uses the gfx card, but tell me, why the heck would i want my gfx card in high power mode all the time? my power bill is big enough each month.

They have make great improvements in enegry saving modes, being the ACPI 2.0 and some of the 3.0 highly updated.
Vista takes less energy. BTW, all the work your GFX is doing with the desktop, is work that your CPU isn't doing; being the GFX best suited for this work, it takes less energy to do.

Windows vs. Linux, and older and bitter figth than Kara vs. Kami

[ashling]

Windows vs. Linux, and older and bitter figth than Kara vs. Kami

Not really, I use windows but I'm still not getting Vista anytime soon

[xenofur]

as far as i am aware neither the cpu nor the gfx have *smooth* power settings and can only switch between "idle" and "high" states. usually the gfx card sucks more power when in high mode and usually cpus switch into high mode already when they go above 2% usage, so it won't matter much wether it has less to do.

acpi and such is nice, but aren't those for things like standby, hibernation, etc. etc. as such totally irrelevant to power consumption in normal running mode.

and uh, no linux vs. windows debate here, i don't have linux on any of my comps. i am only comparing xp vs. vista and wondering wether it's worth shelling out ANY money at all.

[kaetemi]

kaetemi, mithur, i suggest reading this: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/p ... _cost.html

That seems to be about HDMI really, not Vista. And to get those 'restrictions', your content needs to be 'protected' first, so where's the problem? Just dont get protected content, you can easily get unprotected stuff at the same and higher quality.

[xenofur]

the problem is:
unprotected or not is irrelevant. if windows thinks the content is premium, i.e. high quality, it will downgrade it if the hardware does not fit vista's idea of drm-compliant. funnily enough downgrading does not work and it will simply refuse to work.
a friend of mine who is musician has already run into this problem. she has a lot of quite expensive sound processing hardware that simply refuses to work if she uses it to process sound data of production quality. the kicker: the "premium content" is copyright to her, as such vista shouldn't meddle there at all, but it thinks it's "premium", sees the hardware doesn't offer encryption interfaces and goes: "not with me".

[mithur]

as far as i am aware neither the cpu nor the gfx have *smooth* power settings and can only switch between "idle" and "high" states. usually the gfx card sucks more power when in high mode and usually cpus switch into high mode already when they go above 2% usage, so it won't matter much wether it has less to do.

Hmmm... ACPI is much more than that. There aren't only two modes of consume, but many more. And many modes of performance, in GFX and CPU. Can see some info here.

In fact, that's one of the main advantages of DX10. The Unified Arquitecture DX10 requires (Not dedicated hardware for every task, such as texturing, shaders, etc..., but one hardware for all task) makes that energy saving could be greatly advantage. My GFX has 96 steam processors; if the Graphics I'm running requiere full potency, the 96 will be working; but if I'm running Half-Life 1, only a few will be doing the work. (I have a GeForce 8800 GTS).

i.e.: when I run Halflife my GFX is almost 10º lower then when I run Half-Life 2

[fadebait]

Works ok.
The driver version checking on ryzom launch can be annoying as it asks you to update your drivers every time for ATI cards to do different vista versioning.
On some cards alt-tabbing causes texture issues too - but alt-tabbing is not 100% on XP either.