[mabaker]

I think it's a little insane!

From Vista RTM tells a RAM graphic tale

Vista RTM tells a RAM graphic tale

section: windows, for your questions: IT forum, 18.11.2006
WE GOT out hands on Vista RTM and we have a few key points to share with you. First of all, Half Life 2 episode one works great on the Radeon X1950XTX. We wanted to give it a try with G80, EVGA Geforce 8800 GTX but we still don't have any drivers for this card.


Sources close to Nvidia said it might happen by the end of this week. Well it's Friday, so it cannot get much more end of the week than this. Unless you count Saturday. It's out either tonight or delayed until next week.

Vista build 6000 installs in 25 minutes and you need some 60 minutes do an upgrade from the past RC2 build 58xx. I installed Creative Labs X-Fi drivers, the beta ones and they works just fine and SATA SiL drivers work great as well.

After a few touches we were ready for the rock and what I call the role. Well our test machine was powered with 4GB OCZ PC3700 gold memory but Vista 32 bit won't recognise nor address more than 3.25GB.

Once it boots up Vista RTM takes between 700 and 750MB of memory. The good news it that the system is much more agile than before. It reacts instantly and there is no disk swapping, at least if you have 2GB+ memory.

I didn't want to install the 64 bit version as Battlefield 2142 and some other games don't even want to install, not even to talk about playing it. I installed 32 bit version and Battlefield 2142 works perfectly. I didn't had a single issue with the game and with FX60, 4 GB memory, Radeon X1950XTX at 1280x1024 it works with 4X FSAA and 8X Aliasing with around 60+ FPS.

Half Life 2 works between 60 and 160 FPS but it works super smoothly at 4X FSAA and 8 X Anisotroping, all high and reflect all settings.

vista works and feels much better than any beta and I burned so many DVD's and installed every single one. I followed it from its first tottering steps and it grew up to be one nice operating system. We will play more and will check the compatibility shortly and we will give you some more benchmarks.

It uses anything between 550 and 750 MB of memory depends on the boot and It takes 1.3 GB or more when you play battlefield 2142 actually not that bad after all. We will play with the memory a bit more.

Here is how it looks and get use to it, as you will be seeing these ones of similar for a veryl long times. Windows 3.1 anyone?

[chabig]

Not a big deal. The machine had 4 gigabytes.

[Kevin]

Yeah and this is a surprised from the King of Bloatware?

[Strupat]

I agree with the two replies.

Also, don't think that that all of that data stored in RAM is just garbage. It serves, as the article states, as a very fast buffer for all of the commonly used programs and tasks. I don't see why this is a bad thing. If all of the DLLs etc. are preloaded into RAM when the OS boots, a program that usually needs to load a bunch of big DLLs will not as they are already in RAM. The program will load faster and will (appear to) use less memory than in Windows XP or earlier.

[Tuoder]

Vista is going to drive hardware sales. If Vista runs quickly with a lot of RAM, but still runs when swapping, then hey, I'll survive. I was about to build a Conroe-based system anyway.

[zerostar]

Im interested in what it does with 1GB of ram, that is the minimum you should have anyway if our running Vista so its not that big of a deal if its a little ram hungry, most systems over the past year have 512 and 1GB is getting to be standard, look at even Apple's systems. I have heard some good things regarding vista so I think 10.5 has some competition if there is nothing too exciting (that we don't know about)

[King Bob On The Cob]

If you let OS X do it's thing, it will do something very similar...

[zerostar]

I have 1.5GB on my Powerbook and am looking at 768MB used with just OS X and Safari so yeah....

[Agasthya]

Originally Posted by zerostar 

I have 1.5GB on my Powerbook and am looking at 768MB used with just OS X and Safari so yeah....

And I think each dashboard widget uses about 350MB of VM even when they are hidden.