Resumo de An Inside Look At Windows Vista

Now set to ship in January 2007, Windows Vista will be Microsoft's
first major operating system release since it introduced Windows XP in
2001.

The new OS is designed to offer a shiny new user interface, better
security, improved data organization and near-instantaneous search. It
will be a major gaming platform release because it includes DirectX 10,
an upgraded and rebuilt collection of application programming
interfaces (APIs) that, according to Microsoft, will offer six to eight
times the graphics performance of DirectX 9.0. We're opening our series
of Windows Vista features with a look at the most striking feature of
Vista, the 3D desktop and the new Aero interface.

Look and feel

Windows Desktop Manager

The next version of Windows brings an end to 20 years of 2D desktop
rendering. Windows Aero is actually just a theme, or skin type, used by
the Desktop Windows Manager, a new graphical system built into Windows
Presentation Foundation. While Windows Vista is Microsoft's DirectX 10
vehicle, the 3D Desktop Windows Manager requires only DirectX 9.0. The
switch to 3D rendering means that Windows will now have a use for that
fancy $400 graphics card on the desktop.

The use of a 3D accelerator gives Windows Vista much more
flexibility in creating imaginative interface displays on the desktop,
such as animated wallpaper. In past Windows versions, the desktop could
display graphics only in 2D. Youngsters may not believe this, but the
very first 3D graphics cards were actually add-on cards that worked in
conjunction with an existing 2D graphics card already in the system.
The Windows Presentation Foundation uses DirectX to take advantage of
your 3D graphics hardware to convert the 2D windows surfaces into
textures that can be rendered onto the desktop.

Instead of displaying plain old windows, the new 3D user interface
elements will be able to scale, rotate, and be manipulated with ease.
The new desktop paves the way for new navigation features, like Flip3D
and an improved Alt-Tab application-switching interface. Flip3D lets
you navigate through all your application windows by pulling your open
windows together and arranging them into a 3D rolodex format that you
can cycle through and select by using your mouse or arrow keys.

The new Alt-Tab interface presents thumbnail shots of the contents
of each window, as opposed to the Alt-Tab interface found in Windows
XP, which provides only an icon of the program. As is the nature of
beta software, nothing is set in stone; the look and functionality
might change considerably.

Windows Aero

Aero is Microsoft's new default 3D desktop theme. Gone are the
bright blues and smooth color gradients of Windows XP. The new
transparent Aero theme features subdued colors and unobtrusive, rounded
corners ready for the Web 2.0 era. Transparencies and soft fade effects
give Aero a polished look. The borders of each window blur objects
lying under them, leaving the window you are working on in focus while
giving you a hint of what lies beneath. It's all very pretty.

Mouse over a navigation button, and the button will glow and spill
light onto neighboring windows or onto the background. New windows
slowly materialize into existence, and, when minimized, they fade and
shrink downward.

To accommodate for no-frills power users, Microsoft will include a
classic Windows theme that closely resembles desktop elements found in
Windows 2000. However, in our hands-on testing with Beta 1 we noticed
that the austere theme doesn't feel as snappy as the Aero interface,
which is strange considering that the Aero theme has a lot more visual
complexity. We'll chalk that up to the beta status of the
product--performance tweaks will likely wait until the end.

3D performance

Graphics card requirements

Windows Vista doesn't have official minimum system requirements yet,
but Microsoft has recommended at least 512MB of memory, a "mIntel or AMD processor and a DirectX 9.0 graphics card for the current
Windows Vista Beta 1. You'll need to have the right hardware to get the
full Windows Vista experience. Yes, your system can run Vista if you
don't have a DirectX 9.0 card, but you won't be able to enjoy the full
Aero desktop effect because the system will default back to 2D mode.

You can't have just any DX9-compatible card either. According to
Andrew Dodd, product manager for ATI's software group, the quality of
the graphics card can impact the performance of the Aero desktop
because it's now just like any other 3D application. Using a new
Windows Vista driver from ATI, we tested a handful of ATI DX9 video
cards on Windows Vista to see if we could get the system to lag on the
desktop. Our 256MB Radeon X1900 XTX and Radeon X850PE cards performed
flawlessly when we dragged a window over 10 open Internet Explorer
windows. Our 128MB Radeon X300 SE showed some slight hitching when we
got up over seven windows, but we had to frantically whip around the
mouse to make it noticeable--we wouldn't have seen any signs of strain
with normal usage. Current discrete DirectX 9.0 video cards should be
able to handle Aero without a problem.

If you're thinking about upgrading your video card for Windows
Vista, consider waiting a little while for ATI and Nvidia to release
their DirectX 10 graphics cards. DirectX 9.0 cards will work great on
the desktop and in legacy DX9 games, but you'll need DirectX 10
hardware for advanced Windows Vista games.

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