Vista All Over

It seems Windows Vista is all the talk these days. Just about everyone knows that there's a new Windows on the way, but many people don't know what it's all about. I'm here to tell you, it's almost usable in the Release Candidate 1 that was shipped out a couple weeks ago, but your hardware selections are going to either make it or break it.

In order to make things easier on smaller OEM's, NVIDIA has launched their Essential Vista program. When you see the Essential Vista logo, you should be fairly confident that you can run Vista in all of the Aero Glass glory that you should be able to, with performance close to that of Windows XP.

For the past few months, I've been testing Vista, from the early Betas all the way through the current RC1. With RC1 came working HDTV Output, and thus it's been running almost non-stop on my home machine. For the record, my home machine is one that would fit into the Essential Vista program, with a GeForce 7900GT video card and a NForce 4 SLI Chipset.

As is usual, Microsoft is bundling the latest 3rd party drivers with their new operating system. This makes setup a breeze on NVIDIA hardware. There was one driver update for the PCI-Express bridge, but other than that, everything is there. The first boot was to a properly configured display, even on my HDTV. Sound, networking, everything was good right out the box.

Performance with this build is very good. It is definitely not as snappy as XP, but most of that is by design. Windows now morph around the screen as you minimize and maximize them, much like Apple's OS X. This adds a little waiting time, but hopefully we'll see a TweakUI-esque utility to control time duration on things like that.

So the moral of the story is that you don't have to spend a ton to get a machine right now that will work with Windows Vista. All you need is to talk to someone who has experience with the OS to make sure that you get everything that you'll need. The NVIDIA Essential Vista program helps you out even more by giving you a good starting point. In fact, I would look for this logo over a "Windows Vista Capable" anytime.

Coprocessors all over!

Back a few months ago, I predicted that coprocessors were about to make a come back. They have in the corporate world, with Cray's introduction of the XD1 supercomputer, using Xilinx's Virtex FPGA alongside AMD's Opteron. I went a few steps further, and predicted that coprocessors would start to make some waves on the desktop side, just like the 3d accelerators that we take for granted these days.

So today I'm reading some news and come across this new company called Aiseek. They make a product called Intia which is a hardware/software combo that aims to give a whole new level of realism in computer games. This product has yet to really get picked up yet, and honestly I hope it never does.

Even though I like the idea of better AI in games, I don't think that we need another $300 card to make it happen. Just like the Ageia Physx card, which has yet to show off any improvements, I think this Intia card is just a bunch of hogwash.

What we need is a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) that can be programmed on the fly to do whatever acceleration is needed. Say you're playing a game that has very high physics demands, turn that FPGA into a physics accelerator and you're off. Shutdown that game and start up one that needs more AI, not a problem. Doing some serious Photoshop? We have that covered too.

ATI is starting to make some moves in that direction. They want to use a second or third graphics card for it's floating-point abilities to help speed up Havok's new physics engine. There's also been talk of using the GPU's power to research complex protein folding. If we can do this without another card, I'm all for it, but don't make me buy a card that I only need for one game.

One add-on board I didn't talk about yet is the Killer NIC from Bigfoot networks. Now this is actually a good product I think, as network processing is something that everyone can use. As broadband speeds near 10Mips, our aging machines are having trouble sorting out all that data. Purchasing a card that takes over that load could potentially help everyone out.

So the coprocessor is back, and I'm sure that Physx, Killer NIC and Intia are just the tip of the iceberg. Let's just hope we don't get stuck swapping cards depending on the game we want to play.