Microsoft revises minimal GPU requirements for longhorn

[VJ]

There will be 3 layers:
Aero
-> GPU: DirectX 9, at least 32MB of RAM, Intel AGP 4x bus, minimal 1024 x 768
Aero glass
-> GPU: DirectX 9, at least 64MB of RAM, Intel AGP 4x bus, minimal 1024 x 768
Win2000 mode
-> should work on lower end systems

http://www.winnetmag.com/windowspaulthurrott/Article/ArticleID/42580/windowspaulthurrott_42580.html

Jörg

[Jammrock]

That was nice of them to reduce the standard. I loaded a Longhorn build on my laptop a couple of months ago and it brought my laptop to it's virtual knees.

I wouldn't recommend running Longhorn unless you have at least 512 MB RAM (1 GB Recommended), with a beefy vid card. At least the current builds are hogs.

Jammrock

[VJ]

Euhm, the specs I mentioned are concerning the videocard: it needs to have 32 MB for Aero, and 64 MB for Aero Glass. This is not the overall system spec...

Jörg

[UtwigMU]

Basically this means, Matrox needs full DX9 part for Longhorn.

Currently the rumour mill is that Longhorn will be scaled down and released sooner (end of 05/early 06 instead of 06/07).

[skinrock]

Where do you get this Longhorn?

[Greebe]

M$,.. unless you are in Texas,.. you better have 733t roping skilz if you go for the latter

[a_h]

Nice to see that M$ copies *cough* reinvents all those nice features Mac OS X has for at least one year now (translucent effects, bouncing icons!!).

Sorry, couldn't resist - Cheers, Hannes

Edit: forgot to say that OS X features a hw accelerated gui for more than one year now.

[Wombat]

Originally posted by a_h
Nice to see that M$ copies *cough* reinvents all those nice features Mac OS X has for at least one year now (translucent effects, bouncing icons!!).

Sorry, couldn't resist - Cheers, Hannes

Edit: forgot to say that OS X features a hw accelerated gui for more than one year now.

Yeah, because OS X was the first to have those things

[Jon P. Inghram]

I could be wrong, (but I'm not ) but the Amiga had a HW accelerated GUI a tad bit longer than a year ago.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

lol@Jon

Aero looks promising...

now, I am left wondering when KDE/Gnome will get their acts together...

hmm.... KDE w/3D effects... yummy

I wonder if my 5200 /128MB will be enough.

This is stupid, but when they say DX9, is it beause they need vertex shaders or something?

And like wth. I can't picture Longhorn as a gaming environment... lol...

[DGhost]

they require a number of capabilities that were introduced with DX9, one of which is PS2.0

[leech]

Originally posted by Jon P. Inghram
I could be wrong, (but I'm not ) but the Amiga had a HW accelerated GUI a tad bit longer than a year ago.

oh yeah, the hardware blitter...

Just out of curiousity, am I the only one thinking that we don't need all this flash? I mean really, if it requires a freaking 64mb video card than aren't they doing something wrong?

As far as KDE/Gnome goes, I think they're mostly waiting on the ability to do it through X windows. There are various hacks for making windows transparent, and KDE already has a bouncing icon for the startup notification (at least it's there in 3.2.x) Personally, if I ever decide to use Longhorn (which I probably never will...) then I'd end up just switching it to the Win2k look like I have with Windows XP. Until M$ get off their arses and make a real theme engine, then they can go blow. I mean come on, charging for themes?

Leech

[Wombat]

Originally posted by leech

Just out of curiousity, am I the only one thinking that we don't need all this flash? I mean really, if it requires a freaking 64mb video card than aren't they doing something wrong?

Who knows? Did people really need a GUI to start with?

[Faramir1966]

No,but it makes life much easier .
Well.....at least most of the times...

[Jon P. Inghram]

It also had an extremely primitive coprocessor, the copper, which you might (if you were really drunk maybe) consider as a very remote cousin of the shaders in modern video cards. Although with only 3 instructions and the various timing issues it's not the most powerfull device around.

• Wait for the monitors electron beam to reach a certain location on screen,
• Move a 16 bit value into a hardware register (can't directly access RAM, but can indirectly via commands sent to the blitter,)
• And even a flow control command, Skip, which skips the next instruction if the video beam has gone past the specified location.

Oh, and HW video data decompression, it could, via a semi-lossy process, expand 6 bit color to 12 bit, or 8 to 18 on AGA systems.

As far as a GUI goes, it's nice to have a simple GUI, even if it's only text based (text graphics count don't they?) I remember learning Pascal on Apple ]['s back in high school, and really enjoying the development system it used. The next year they "upgraded" to Mac's, much to everyone's dissapointment. Then you suddendly were having to fight with the UI, and, shockingly, it also compiled programs noticibly slower.