Microsoft working with GPU vendors to share memory for Aero Glass?

I'd say that they are and it's a good thing. Let's face it: most consumers aren't going to get jazzed about "BitLocker" and "User Account Control"; they want the eye candy. Why is that important? It's important because it's the first and last thing they see. Hey, it's everything in between too. If there isn't a large visual perceptive difference, most folks will try to hang on to Windows XP until 2021!

As our Gotta Be Mobile peeps just found out, all of a sudden we can run Aero Glass in Vista on older machines. Warner and I share a fondness for our Toshiba M200 Tablet PC and we can now both run Aero Glass without any hacks or registry edits. I enabled it back in March, but it took a little bit of work. Now, it just works. Why is that? The screen shot tells the story.

No you don't need tons of video memory to run Aero Glass (but it helps). You need a WDDM driver and a graphics card with DirectX 9.0 and 32 bits per pixel support. However, our two-year old M200s have an arsenal of extra video RAM at their disposal. Instead of relying on the now-anemic 32 MB of dedicated RAM in our NVIDIA Ge-Force Go 5200 FX GPUs, the newest Vista drivers allow for RAM sharing. Good move to get these drivers to allow memory sharing because it really makes the experience downright pleasant!

Comments

[Code E]

I used this on my XP machine when Battle Field 2 came out. It allowed me to run that game on a 32mb graphics card.

[ArchiMark]

I've been testing out RC1 on my lil' UX90S and Aero Glass seems to working well and Vista so far...

Just upgraded to the new Build 5728 today...too soon to know if there's much difference with this build...was running Build 5600 before...

[JimAtLAw]

I only hope they do the same for the ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 drivers!