Moderator: Thanas
You're obviously not a Mac user.Darth Wong wrote:People buy computers to run apps, not operating systems. I will upgrade my computer when there's a particular game that I want to play which runs like shit on my present rig, and not before. Buying a new computer so you can run a new OS is a truly bizarre way to waste your money. Games are recreation, ie- enjoyment. But I would suggest that anyone who derives real enjoyment from using a new OS is in dire need of a life.
I wouldn't call my recent experience in trying to get Ubuntu and Fedora Core 4 running on my Inspiron 9300 'real enjoyment' (read: they wouldn't install at all), but tinkering around with my hardware and software is something I enjoy doing at times.Darth Wong wrote:People buy computers to run apps, not operating systems. I will upgrade my computer when there's a particular game that I want to play which runs like shit on my present rig, and not before. Buying a new computer so you can run a new OS is a truly bizarre way to waste your money. Games are recreation, ie- enjoyment. But I would suggest that anyone who derives real enjoyment from using a new OS is in dire need of a life.
If you weren't still stuck in DOS times you would realise that applications build on top of the OS and it can't "get out of the way" if it is to provide its services to the applications.Xon wrote:Or if you had a vague understanding of how an OS works, you would realize that the OS gets out of the way when something else is inuse.Jawawithagun wrote:So the problem starts when you want to run Vista AND a game at the same time. Y'know, an OS is supposed to leave some resources for applications to use and not hog all of them itself.
In the vast majority of the time, you only pay the bill for what you use. The graphical improvements in Vista are no exception
Nice reading comprehension there.Jawawithagun wrote:If you weren't still stuck in DOS times you would realise that applications build on top of the OS and it can't "get out of the way" if it is to provide its services to the applications.Xon wrote:In the vast majority of the time, you only pay the bill for what you use. The graphical improvements in Vista are no exception
As I very seldomly run fullscreen games but rather spend my time among windowed applications there will be no yielding of control.Xon wrote: When you run a fullscreen game, the Vista graphics layer yields control of the video card and basicly goes to sleep. Any memory usage is paged out as required and it doesnt eat CPU time.
You are aware that Windows can page sections of itself out when neccessary (IIRC, the NT kernel only requires ~5MB of RAM) and the scheduler will ensure that the foreground applications receive more time? It can very much get out of the way - the applications are not accessing all of the OS at the same time.Jawawithagun wrote:If you weren't still stuck in DOS times you would realise that applications build on top of the OS and it can't "get out of the way" if it is to provide its services to the applications.
Might I ask which windowed games you run that are so GPU-hungry that they'll compete with Aero? IIRC, they can also request that Windows drop down to the older render method as well - this was the original way of implementing OpenGL on Vista (which has since changed).Jawawithagun wrote:As I very seldomly run fullscreen games but rather spend my time among windowed applications there will be no yielding of control.
Hm? Games? I'm not running games. Currently I'm running fluid simulations.phongn wrote: Might I ask which windowed games you run that are so GPU-hungry that they'll compete with Aero? IIRC, they can also request that Windows drop down to the older render method as well - this was the original way of implementing OpenGL on Vista (which has since changed).
With respect, what are you worried about, then? Windows will get out of the way (page itself out, give higher priority to your applications, etc.) and let you do your thing. Aren't fluid simulations usually a CPU-bound problem, anyways?Jawawithagun wrote:Hm? Games? I'm not running games. Currently I'm running fluid simulations.
CPU and RAMphongn wrote:With respect, what are you worried about, then? Windows will get out of the way (page itself out, give higher priority to your applications, etc.) and let you do your thing. Aren't fluid simulations usually a CPU-bound problem, anyways?Jawawithagun wrote:Hm? Games? I'm not running games. Currently I'm running fluid simulations.
Aero offloads to the GPU so it reduces CPU load, and the required RAM is fuckall(and the graphics data tries to offloaded onto the GPU without keeping duplicate copies in main RAM, from some of the info I have read about DirectX10).Jawawithagun wrote:CPU and RAM
Mac? Oh yes, I've heard of that FreeBSD knock-off with the cult-like following.Durandal wrote:You're obviously not a Mac user.Darth Wong wrote:People buy computers to run apps, not operating systems. I will upgrade my computer when there's a particular game that I want to play which runs like shit on my present rig, and not before. Buying a new computer so you can run a new OS is a truly bizarre way to waste your money. Games are recreation, ie- enjoyment. But I would suggest that anyone who derives real enjoyment from using a new OS is in dire need of a life.
This is something that the entire concept of paging was invented to prevent. The entire operating system isn't in memory all the time. The most popular paging algorithms will keep the most-referenced pages in memory and leave the least-referenced ones on disk, so if you're running a process which makes a bunch of calls to the graphics layer, the graphics layer stays in memory.Jawawithagun wrote:So the problem starts when you want to run Vista AND a game at the same time. Y'know, an OS is supposed to leave some resources for applications to use and not hog all of them itself.
And when a page is sent to disk, an in memory copy is kept in a standby list. If anything hits the page when it is in the standby list, that gets used instead of pulling it off the disk. Otherwise the oldest entry in the standby list is used to fill any memory allocation requests.Durandal wrote:If you're playing a full-screen game, Vista won't be updating the pixels of your GUI, so Aero will be dereferenced and reside on disk instead of in memory because the addresses of those libraries won't be called by anything.
The minium system requirements have alwasy been bullshit. I've never seen reasonable minium system requirements in comercial software (aka games, MS stuff).Darth Wong wrote:Pure theory aside, is there any particular reason to believe that this will be the first time in history that Microsoft's claims about limited system requirements for a new version of Windows are not bullshit? Or have we forgotten that they always make the same-sounding promises?
Sounds like VistaThirdWorld.Uraniun235 wrote:I remember running Windows 95 on a 486 with 8MB of RAM.
The trick was to not run more than one application at a time.
Minimum system requirements are literally the bare minimum. I have a lot of problems with Microsoft, but how they advertise their system requirements isn't one of them. Hell, Vista is coming with a new ratings control panel that tells you just how well your current computer will run Vista. They may even be releasing such a utility as freeware to help consumers get an idea of how well Vista will run on their box.Darth Wong wrote:Pure theory aside, is there any particular reason to believe that this will be the first time in history that Microsoft's claims about limited system requirements for a new version of Windows are not bullshit? Or have we forgotten that they always make the same-sounding promises?
Here's your $10,000 rigRThurmont wrote:I think Vista is going to be the finest Microsoft OS period, in spite of the shitty name. I plan on buying a $5,000-$10,000 gaming rig when it comes out. In the unlikely event that it blows, I've really been stocking up on XP hardware of late, so I'm well covered (and of course you can always go with Apple, or Linux, or a Sun workstation with Solaris...)
-WGW
