Vista Upgrades May Be Slowed By Graphics

The biggest barrier to users upgrading existing PCs to Windows Vista will be the new operating system's graphics requirements, analysts agree.

"It's very difficult to tell what kind of machine you need to experience the full Aero Glass interface," said Rob Helm, director of research at Kirkland, Wash.-based Directions on Microsoft. "You have to know the video card's memory bandwidth, how much memory is on the card based on the screen size resolution you want to run, and what kind of shader capability your [card's] chip has."

"This is stuff I just don't want to know," added Michael Cherry, another analyst at Directions. "It's very confusing, and seems to be getting more technical than less technical.

"The number one thing in the way of Vista upgrades is graphics. Video is the real issue," said Cherry.

The graphics brouhaha stems from Vista's new vector-based interface rendering technology, dubbed Aero, that at the top end will feature such snappy visual extras as translucent screens, animated program flipping, and icons showing thumbnails of opened files.Microsoft has designed Aero so that it scales to the graphics capability of the PC. According to information it's released to partners in a Vista Product Guide and posted on its "Vista Capable PC Hardware Guidelines" Web site, Aero will require a video adapter that supports WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) video drivers and DirectX 9; it must also have a graphics memory bandwidth of at least 1,800MB per second.

"I know what memory bandwidth is," said Helm, "but I don't know how you would find out what your card has. These requirements will put up some additional barriers that will hang up even sophisticated users."

PCs using a video adapter with WDDM support but missing other requirements -- such as the Pixel Shader 2.0 support, for instance -- will run a stripped-down interface that looks similar to an updated Windows XP desktop, not the full Aero. Microsoft's even come up with names for the scaled Aero experiences: "Aero To Go," Aero Express," and "Aero Glass."

Microsoft's laid out memory requirements for graphics cards, with 128MB needed for resolutions greater than 1280-by-1024 pixels, and 256MB necessary for 1920-by-1200-pixel resolution. For PCs that use on-board chipsets that share system memory rather than a separate video card, Microsoft's saying that 1GB of dual channel RAM is the bottom end.

Helm and Cherry agreed that the graphics requirements are both confusing and likely to stymie upgrading."I think a lot of people will just give up [trying to figure out Vista's graphics requirements] and wait until they buy a new machine to get Vista," said Helm.

Cherry was more explicit.

"Microsoft has never tried to hold back its developers in terms of the operating system footprint or resources," he said. "They just always bet that the price of the hardware will come down so they don't have to turn their software."

That may be a mistake this time around.

"Is Vista compelling enough to spend that much money?" Cherry asked. "We're not just talking about paying for the OS, but about changing out hardware. I think a lot of people will decide to just live with what they have."They're going to say what they have now is good enough."

Cherry also took Microsoft to the woodshed for not disclosing firm system requirements for Vista, even though the OS is supposedly only 7 months from release to businesses.

"When [Jim] Allchin discussed the delay, he said Microsoft was doing this to help the partners. But this flies in the face of that. They should have the hardware thing nailed. What's keeping them from putting out a one-page, tops, explanation, of what's necessary to run Vista?

"If they can't coherently describe how to buy a machine with confidence, they're not helping the partners."

A move like this -- and not what Cherry sees as the vague "Vista Capable" campaign, which he said was "just another sticker, like the Intel Inside" -- might boost sales in the fourth quarter if consumers and businesses were assured the PCs could be upgraded later."At the moment, the best thing will be to wait until you go into a store and see Vista actually running on it," said Cherry. "But that's a year away, isn't it?"