What's lost by not having Aero (i.e. Home Basic)?

TheVoice

TheVoice

TheVoice

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I'm sort-of considering upgrading my Dell notebook to Vista (pending full driver support, anyway). Now unfortunately it has an Intel GMA915 graphics chipset, which isn't able to run Vista's Aero interface.

The only contact with Vista that I've really had is playing around for a minute or two with it on a notebook in a high-street shop. It clearly had Aero enabled, and I was very impressed with the animation etc of all the windows.

My question is, do I lose all of that animation by not being able to run Aero, or does Aero just contribute certain elements of that? Will Vista 'look' more like XP by not being able to run Aero? Because I don't really see the point in paying for Home Premium if I can't use Aero. I'd rather get HP for my PC, and Basic for the notebook.

Thanks for any help in figuring this out. :)
 
Vista will look more like XP with Aero disabled. Aero includes such things as the fading in/out effect when maximising/minimising/opening/closing windows. Aero also has a 'glass' like appearance. Buttons sort of shine when you hold your mouse over them, and windows are partially transparent. 3D flip is an Aero only feature. You will lose all of these with Home Basic.
 
Good question, and in fact from the couple of hours use of Vista just looks prettier, it has see through icons and partial see through dialogue boxes. I guess this uses some graphics power. I actually prefer Windows 98 look, bland but it does the job. I use the standard start menu. Disable all open/close dialogue box effects, fade in/fade out, instant start menu open.

If you can set Vista to look basic I hope it uses less resources, currently 300MB more memory for the same thing (windows idle) Vista has DX10 support though, I wonder if XP will get DX10? A bit annoying if it doesn't, have to upgrade OS just for that. So far all components detected and vista drivers installed (PC in sig) but X-Fi which hasen't arrived yet has beta drivers. My HTPC has M-Audio Revo 2496 which has beta drivers too. The Vista MC HTPC front end is a bit more polished however it still lacks variable speed ffwd/rrwnd! Vista Ultimate has lots of extra little progs bundled with it.
 
Without Aero (and thus the all important "desktop compositor"), Vista looks and performs badly. You'll be back to the way XP et al render their screen... so whenever you drag a window over another window you'll see the artifacts as the window underneath repaints and all the CPU load that goes along with it.

Microsoft made a performance trade-off with Vista. You see you can optimise a piece of software to be either memory intensive or CPU intensive... All of Vista Aero's subsystem is geared to being memory intensive. Every window is back buffered as a DirectX 3D surface (a.k.a. "texture") on your graphic card's memory. Then when the graphics card's vertical sync triggers an hardware interrupt (i.e. a screen refresh) the "desktop compositor" component of Vista takes all these windows (the 3D surfaces) and arranges them appropriately using their X, Y and Z-order positions. Then it applies the various pixel shaders to add the translucency and hey presto you have a smooth as silk desktop.
 
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NathanE said:
Without Aero (and thus the all important "desktop compositor"), Vista looks and performs badly. You'll be back to the way XP et al render their screen... so whenever you drag a window over another window you'll see the artifacts as the window underneath repaints and all the CPU load that goes along with it.
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One clarification to make here - there are actually several seperate visual modes to consider here.

1) Windows Aero - as you would expect, everything, all the special effects and so on.

2) Windows Vista Standard. This is default in Vista Home Basic. Unlike Aero, it doesn't have transparency, 3D effects, live previews, and so on - but it *does* use the Vista method of drawing windows and is still vastly improved over the XP system. It has pretty much the same hardware requirements as "real Aero" - it's an artificially reduced version used on Home Basic.

3) Windows Vista Basic - this is what you see on all versions of windows if your hardware or software is not compatible with Aero. It uses the XP method of desktop composition

4) Windows Classic (the "like Windows 2000" option, fairly rubbish)
So, just to be clear: if you run Business or Home Premium or Ultimate, the "basic" mode that you see when you run an incompatible program is *not the same* as the Home Basic default desktop. It also means that, even on Vista Home Basic, the desktop will work better if you have compatible hardware and software.

If you don't have the necessary graphics card, then you will of course only get the worst option.
 
NathanE said:
Without Aero (and thus the all important "desktop compositor"), Vista looks and performs badly. You'll be back to the way XP et al render their screen... so whenever you drag a window over another window you'll see the artefacts as the window underneath repaints and all the CPU load that goes along with it.
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Something which most people see once in a blue moon.

But yes, I believe you are right to say that Vista without Aero performs badly. I was reading a thread on another forum from someone who said that Vista was much quicker and less sluggish with Aero enabled (he had been running with it disabled in the misguided belief that it would speed things up for him).

Vista runs like crap on my machine with a DX8 card, far more sluggish than XP so on that basis I suggest avoiding Vista Basic like the plague, unless you want it to run worse than XP on an ISA graphics card.
 
Once in a blue moon? :/ I see it daily even on a dual core XP x64 machine.

I think IE7 is back buffered now, but IE6 used to be one of easiest demonstrations. It repainted god awfully slow when you dragged a simple Notepad window over a complex page.

Visual Studio '05 seems to repaint god awfully slow too. Drag a Notepad window over the code editor and the text will literally disappear for almost half a second!
 
NathanE said:
Once in a blue moon? :/ I see it daily even on a dual core XP x64 machine.
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Yep. I can't remember when I last saw such a thing. Perhaps it affects some apps worse than others; apps that you use and I don't :)
 
Yes but I seem to recall from previous discussions on this that you use Windowblinds? That software performs back buffering for every window.
 
That is correct :) I admit I have used it for a long time, so my memory could be hazy but I don't remember, before I used it, having the problems you seem to experience on a regular basis. I've seen it, I know what you mean, but it's always been a rare issue for me.
 
dirtydog said:
That is correct :) I admit I have used it for a long time, so my memory could be hazy but I don't remember, before I used it, having the problems you seem to experience on a regular basis. I've seen it, I know what you mean, but it's always been a rare issue for me.
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It's not a problem for me at all :) I'm just pointing out one of the technical advantages of Vista's way of rendering the screen.

Shoseki said:
So I guess the question is, what will be lost by not having DirectX 10?
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You mean a DX10 card? Nothing. At least not on the Vista desktop. Games is another matter that I don't know much about :)
 
It kinda seems nuts to not make DirectX 10 compatible with anything but Vista. There will be many people who will not be upgrading for a while, for one reason or another, for whom Windows XP will not play the new games. And so games developers will have to seriously consider waiting until the majority of people have upgraded before putting their faith in directx10, otherwise they will be restricting their customer base significantly, alternatively they may switch to OpenGL instead, making it all a moot point.

Personally, that would be my personal choice, but I am biased because OpenGL is mostly based on open standards...
 
I don't think any DX10-exclusive games have been announced yet. Crysis and all the other obvious contenders support DX9 just fine.
 
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