What do you need to run Aero Glass?

I can't believe I am asking the same question I asked the last time I was buying a laptop (2 years ago) but what specs are good to run Aero Glass Windows Vista?

Are there laptops which are capable of this without tipping the scales over?

Thanks

 

256 mb DDR desktop PCI Express 2 graphics card.

i don't think many laptops will be able to get the full graphics "experince" from vista as they use a taxing way to draw the graphics and it also will have a bunch of taxing useless effects. MS is trying to push up standard system specs or something, as Vista has insane req to fully use it effectively.

 

Right, like many people would be happy with those specs.

I'd say any DirectX 9.0 capable GPU released in the last year or so. So pretty much any 6000 series nVidia GPU or xXXX series ATi GPU will run Aero Glass.

I don't think running it on a laptop away not plugged into a socket is a good idea though. Aero Glass uses pixel shaders for blending so that won't be friendly to the battery in any way.

 

yes most fairly new cards will be able to run it, but it won't be at its full potential. Most of the graphics options (for notebooks esp) will have to be off or on a low setting. Microsoft, i think, wants to make people get bigger more powerful systems so that they can continue to program poorly and the power of the system will make up for it.

And from what i have read, the type of card i mentioned is pretty much what ms has said you need for FULL graphics enjoyment.

 

I think the specs are blown out of proportion. I don't know how m$ is supposed to market this with such high requirements. I really would like to see this aero glass interface for myself - to think that I would need a 256MB DDR2 memory card is just ridiculous. I mean, I have one, but to think it's required....I don't know.

I recently did a poll on integrated and dedicated graphics cards, and half the people who voted had integrated. I wonder how Vista is supposed to run on that - I don't think many people will be that happy running it on integrated and it just looking like regular windows.

Well, I read a recent article not too far back, and it said that if you are going to get a new computer, make sure it has a DX9-class video card with 64MB of VRAM. That sounds more like it.

 

Yeah, i think that with an integrated card, it would pretty much just look like win Xp but with different colors.
Other than that i would agree with 64mb vid card would be the minimum nowadays.

 

I bet those specs won't come through. But it would be nice if everone decided to upgrade their computers, then game makers can actually make better looking games Also, by the end of this year, WindowBlinds 5 will already be able to do the "Aero Glass" Effect on today's computers.

 

I think Microsoft is pushing up the graphic style a lot to appeal to the masses and have them upgrade. IMO ordinary consumers will have close to no functionality benefit from Vista over XP (expecially if they get the Vista 32-bit).

I disabled all graphic themes in XP