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Originally Posted by boris  The OS itself is just one of the many things that need memory. Microsoft are just being honest with their memory recommendations. If you run Photoshop or any other 'serious' app, you will need to go over 1GB anyways.
Windows 3.1 after all ran well on 4MB of RAM.
In Vista, you have an anti-spyware app (Defender), a firewall and many other things running by default, that you didn't have in older versions (XP had the firewall).
No OS on its own is very useful. It matters what software you run on it. I use lots of software and run lots at the same time (plus virtual machines), that's why I went to 2GB. It had nothing to do with the about 100Mb (not 2x or 4x from XP) more that Vista requires. |
You're right of course that an OS is useless without software. And of course power users and software developers need a lot more RAM than an average user. But Vista system requirements are intended for for average users! Average users don't need 1 GB of RAM. They don't use Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, Visual Studio, 3D Studio Max, etc.
I have personally seen Windows 2000 use as little as 80 MB of RAM without any software running. With that memory usage, 256 MB of RAM would be more than enough for an average user running Windows 2000. If Vista uses a lot more than Windows 2000 out of the box then it's very bloated. As a comparison, Ubuntu Linux requires just 256 MB of RAM, and it's a very modern OS.
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Originally Posted by boris And as a developer who has deep understanding of DX10, it really is hard to back port. There are a lot of changes on the driver side (it has been moved out of the kernel). This is not just a simple new version with few changes. And that's why both NVidia and ATI took long to provide OK drivers for DX10 - lots of changes. |
I don't know much about the low level implementation of DirectX 10 so I can't argue about that. I just know that they dropped everything but Direct3D, and as I understand it doesn't use COM anymore. However, if the Wine team is able to create a working implementation of DX 10 for pre-Vista Windows, this will reflect very poorly on Microsoft.