No performance hit in games for running Vista Aero interface

[Stonedofmoo]

This is good news for us gamers. I remember when the details on Vista were hazy they were saying that the Aero interface would always be loaded into memory, thus robbing you off precious graphics card memory in games, but thats not true

Performance is just the same as Vista suspends Aero whilst in a pure 3D environment (i.e. a full screen game)

Result!

The article is here: http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_vista_aero_glass_performance/default.asp

 

[NathanE]

Yes this has been known since before the Longhorn Reset :/

The new display driver model in Vista basically treats the GPU like a processor - in that the kernel performs time slicing of the GPU. This allows multiple 3D applications to use the GPU at the same time (in XP/2000 etc only one 3D application can be running at a time). As soon as a game loads up it registers itself with the system as being a "high GPU loading process" which gives it a much higher priority than the Aero desktop. Also note that Aero itself uses probably about 1% of a modern GPU's power - it really doesn't test it at all. Aero has a bigger impact though on the GPU's available memory...

Secondly, if GPU memory is tight, Aero's window textures will get paged out to system RAM. And if system RAM is also tight then these textures will also get paged all the way to the page file. Not desirable at all, but at least the game will get as good'er chance as any to play at maximum FPS.

This really is a next generation OS and there's nothing out there that will touch it in terms of 3D for many years yet. OSX's 3D support is comparitively miniscule.