Are You Ready for Vista Graphics?

Microsoft Windows Vista will push the PC hardware envelope in all sorts of directions -- more RAM, faster CPUs -- but nowhere does it make greater demands than on the graphics hardware in your PC. Vista incorporates a bundle of new graphics standards and technologies. If you want to use all its graphics features, the odds are you're in line for an upgrade to your graphics card.

The reason is the Aero graphical interface. It's Aero that does those lovely semi-transparent effects and frosty window borders. (For a look at the Aero interface, take a look at this Image Gallery from the recent article First Look: Windows Vista RC2.)

To do Aero, Vista runs the same advanced graphics APIs created by Microsoft for computer games that use 3D graphics, DirectX. In fact, Vista supports two versions of DirectX, and so it requires a graphics card capable of running both DirectX 9.0L and DirectX 10, which will hit the market about the same time Vista does.

Vista On Two Levels
Vista isn't available yet, so Microsoft is encouraging PC makers to brand their products with "Ready for Vista" logo stickers. The specs for these "approved" systems come on two levels.

First, there's a sort of "base price" level -- what Microsoft is calling the "Vista Capable" logo level -- that calls for a CPU that runs at 800MHz or better, 512MB of RAM, and a graphics processor that is DirectX 9 capable. "Vista Capable" PCs are generally ready to run Vista Home Basic, which won't run Aero and Flip3D or Windows Media Center

Then there's a "nicely equipped at . . . " level -- the "Vista Premium" logo level, in Microsoft-speak. A PC that wears the Windows Vista Premium Ready logo sticker is supposed to be able to run any feature in any version of Vista, and to do that it must include at least a 1GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor, 1GB of RAM, 40GB of hard drive capacity with 15GB free, a DVD Drive, audio output, and support for Internet access. And some pretty hefty graphics capabilities:

Getting In The Game
For PC users who spend their days looking at Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, all this emphasis on super-high-fidelity graphics may seem like overkill -- but for Microsoft, it is probably a necessary step toward the future of computing. Graphic horsepower is at the center of what people will be using computers for, according to Microsoft, no matter which version of Vista you'll be using. Even the Home Basic version of Vista includes the ability to play DVDs and work with digital photographs, while Vista Ultimate includes some whizzy media center features for recording and streaming video between the PCs in your house.

The makers of graphics cards are, naturally, thrilled. "We're ecstatic because it's the first time the world's No. One application, Windows, has used these capabilities," said Andrew Fear, software product manager for Nvidia.

"With Vista requiring a dedicated graphics processor to exploit its full potential, this makes 3D graphics performance matter to every computer user," said Terry Makedon, group manager of software and video marketing for card and chipset maker ATI. "DirectX 9 was introduced in December, 2003. Aero requires a graphics card capable of running DirectX 9, so if you've got a graphics card more than two or three years old you won't be running Vista Aero."

What Will Your Desktop Look Like?
But that's not to say you won't be running Vista. The Vista graphical interface is scalable, and the install routine checks your system, then sets up the level of graphics it thinks is best suited to your hardware. This can be one of four levels:

Windows Aero. The full-on 3D graphics experience, with smoothly rounded transparent window borders and sidebar, shaded buttons and status bar.

Windows Vista Basic. The sidebar stays transparent, but the window borders go opaque. Obviously a throttled-down 3D graphics experience.

Windows Standard. Light gray and blue color scheme, sharp-cornered windows, flat buttons. Very much like Windows 2000.

Windows Classic. It's Windows 98 all over again. Darker grays and blues.

The eye-candy features of the Aero interface disappear quickly as you move down-scale. Here's the Flip 3D window selector in Aero. It's a tour de force of DirectX 3D graphics programming. The individual window thumbnails grow and shrink as you mouse over them like cards in a Rolodex file.

Here's the window selector in Windows Vista Basic. The 3D graphics are gone, as are the thumbnail renderings of the windows. You get a row of static icons:

One step further down, and the feature disappears entirely: Windows Standard and Windows Classic don't include the window selector at all.

"Even hardware that doesn't have the Premium logo may run Aero," said Fear. "Your system may not be that fast, say, so when you install you don't get Aero by default." But you can still turn it on yourself in the Control Panel and at least try it. "If it won't run well and you turn it on," he said, "you'll probably see slow performance."

The reason performance slows is actually a feature of Vista, not a bug. "Vista is very scalable," said Makedon. "The better the graphics hardware you have in your PC, the better Aero will run. If you've got a high-end graphics card in your system you can open 20, 30, even 50 windows and move them around." But if you've got a less-than-capable graphics card then the CPU will kick in to help out -- a feature of WDDM. But, said Makedon, "because it's sharing system memory with the graphics you'll hit performance problems pretty quickly."

Is Your PC Ready For Vista?
If you're wondering how well your PC might run Vista, and whether or not your video card is ready for Aero, Fear recommended Microsoft's Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor, a test program you can download and run on your machine. Note: The Upgrade Advisor runs only in Internet Explorer, and only on Windows XP. Microsoft's reasoning for the XP limitation is that XP is the only version you can upgrade to Vista. If you're running any other version of Windows you must do a clean install.

The Upgrade Advisor evaluates your system and recommends the version of Vista it would be best suited to run. It also inventories your hardware and the applications you have installed and lists any problems it sees with system issues, hardware devices, or incompatible software.

Many of the problems with applications seem to be related to problems with untested or uncertified device drivers, a problem Microsoft is working hard to address. Others are harder to explain -- on one test machine, Upgrade Advisor reported that Microsoft's own Microsoft Works application "may not work as expected after upgrading to Windows Vista." Still others may be the result of Vista's tighter security: the test machine's Java runtime and Norton Internet Security were flagged.

If you're not running XP, you can try the Vista Readiness Advisor on ATI's Web site. The ATI test doesn't inventory your apps like Upgrade Advisor, but it will give you more information on your graphics card -- and naturally, it makes recommendations aimed at selling you an ATI-based card.

The primary take-away from the ATI test is that to run Vista graphics well you need a graphics card with at least 256MB of memory. The reason is WDDM: if you try to run anything more demanding than the Windows Basic interface on a graphics card with less than 256MB of graphics memory, Vista will allocate 128MB of system memory for graphics, which may impact overall system performance.

Pick A Graphics Card For Vista
Both NVIDIA's Andrew Fear and ATI's Terry Makedon were quick to point out that you don't need to spend $500 for a gamer's speedball graphics card to run Vista. In fact, because of the huge growth in PC gaming, as well increasing interest in video recording and editing and media creation on PCs, Vista's graphics technologies are already widely implemented in graphics products at all price levels.

Here's a look at some low-end, mid-priced, and high-end graphics cards that would make good choices, either to upgrade existing PCs or to equip new ones:

The Low End: Under $100