Which one of these videos blows you away?
Are there any impressive Aero videos out there?
-James
I am a software developer living in the Raleigh, NC area where I run Infozerk. This blog is about writing software and the business of software, as well as some .NET or Ruby on Rails from time to time. I have written a number of books and articles, the most recent being Windows Developer Power Tools.
I don't use Linux as a desktop, but all the same, what blew me away most was that XGL is above all, SMOOTH, and this on some really really low-end nVidia TwinView card in an HP XW4000 at work. It's a GeForce 5100 at best. A $20 graphics card.
I mean, if you play the occassional videogame on the computer I'm sure you can appreciate that *NOTHING* runs on those things. But XGL does. And you would never know how meek of a card was doing it.
Maybe it's just because I know nothing about 2D composition or 3D rasterizers (is that the right word?), but seeing the difference between Xgl and Aero... I just don't understand where all the power's going with Aero? I'm guessing maybe Aero just doesn't take advantage of the 3D capabilities of your graphics card? But I coulda sworn that was the whole point of it... color me genuinely confused.
Um... yeah... the XGL video pretty much blows me away there. I have hunted for some good Aero demos and turned up nothing.
But I do know someone who had Vista fry their video card on their laptop, and that's a pretty cool feature. The last time I had seen software fry a video card was in 1996 (sucks it was my QuickBasic code that time).
the difference in coolness is rooted in the fact that XGL is driven by the developers who write the effects. Aero is driven by the marketeers and other non-technies. This means that the effectdevelopers effectively have carte-blanch in XGL, like in the old-days in the demoscene: lets see who can cook up the best effects.
With aero it's different, a thick layer of overhead and other uselessness stops any creativity in its tracks and forces teh effects they can cook up into the code, but as they're totally inable to even cook up semi-cool stuff as they never ever written even a 3D starfield back in highschool, it's logical the aero results are pretty bad.
I also find the point put forward by Sam very important: Aero needs top of the line hardware to run. My intel 915GML chipset in my dell laptop of a year old isn't sufficient (my system is rated 1.0, go figure) so aero won't even run. However, MacOSX and also XGL have proven that you don't need fancy 3D hardware to do the same effects and even more.
What's even more sad is that Microsoft tries to downplay the serious lack of eyecandy in vista with the fact that it does MORE than macosx and XGL.
Sure... too bad all these nice things happen behind the wallpaper of my desktop...
Aero looks like a KID in front of XGL .
I don't think i you don't have sufficient h/w
you can turn Aero off ( which you can do in XGL ) .
Kudos to XGL team
Sam Smoot wrote:
> ... this on some really really low-end nVidia TwinView card in an HP XW4000 at work. It's a GeForce 5100 at best.
How do you know? Where can I find the specs of the machine used in this demo?
help, i have a dell insperon b130 lapptop, nd ,my index score is 1.0, because of the fact that there are some issues with media playback, even though my aero rating is 2.5, and all my other ratings are above, any help?