Reading the APC section on Vista and what
Nigel Page (MSDN Australia) said about Vista's hardware requirements makes me shivver
Nigel Page is a strategist with Microsoft Australia. He told APC
today that Vista would work best on a video card with more than 256MB
RAM, 2GB of DDR3 memory and a S-ATA 2 hard drive.
Well it is a year away, so theres not much of an issue there (well with
DDR-III, SATA-II not really 'there yet'), what concerns me the most is
the DRM technologies MS have "bundled" with Windows to make the big
boys and gals in Hollywood happy:
"In Longhorn, the computer determines that a
video card is not faked or being intercepted, so there's a lot of onus
on the writers of the drivers. It also checks If there are digital or
analogue drivers. If only digital outputs are in use, it will then
check a display has HDCP capability – high bandwidth digital content
protection. The communication between the video card and the device is
encrypted and only decrypted by the display device itself. If all that
is true, the operating system says, "ok, gotcha, we are running on a
protected video path which is OK for premium content… HD-DVDs, BluRay,
or a video file that someone has marked."
"If you don't comply
with PVP, we're going to downscale the quality upon playback… you're
going to get a lower quality version; you're not going to get the high
def content the way it was intended to be viewed. You'll find that most
plasma displays have HDCP already. But this isn't available in computer
monitors. I have not been able to find a single monitor that supports
it. We are going to see a lot of change in this space.
So in otherwords, theres lots of encryption going on under the hood
(one of the reasons why Vista will work better in dual-core/multi-core
environments) so people cant play Videos or "hax0r" then like they used
to.
"There's a LOT of encryption and decryption going on. We
communicate on the PCI Express bus in a fully encrypted format because
it is considered a public bus.
"The downside is that all your
existing flat panel monitors and projectors aren't going to work with
high-def videos in Vista. Bad news."
That last part nearly broke my heart. The lovely 2405FPW is useless when Vista RTMs...
So, will i drop everything and convert to Linux? Maybe daringly move
over to Mac (maybe even grab an iPod and jump around trying to "act
cool")? Hell no! Theres still 1 year to go and while I'm using other
OS's outside of Windows (FreeBSD, Fedora and to a lesser extent OS X
Tiger) I dont consider such a rush to move to a new OS just yet.
On a side note however, those of you who run Beta 1 and find its
running "faster than XP" is because (as the article states) a bulk of
the GUI code is now sent to the GPU, this alone makes Windows far more
responsive along with the new graphics subsystem.