Graphics Vista Aero & Integrated Graphics

Anyone tried using aero on an IGP (Laptop perhaps)? If so what was the responsiveness like? Did it run aero comfortably or was it a bit choppy. Just trying to get a sense of the minimum power required to run aero

 

I ran it on a GMA950 chip, seemed fine enough. But in fairness, I only used it for a few minutes. I think that RAM will be more important provided you have a fairly recent integrated chip. Actually, I'm going to give it a new shot with the RC2 (5840) and see how it goes, as the system was being foolish earlier (it comes with trying to triple-boot three OSes that you aren't really supposed to use on a school laptop). I'll get back to you, but I think you'll be well enough off, provided you don't expect to do any gaming.

Update: Just installed the 5840 release of Vista (RC2?). Aero glass is working fine on the GMA950, with all of it's superfluous visual effects (solitaire is surprisingly snazzy ) Actually, better than I would have thought (though, OSX86 worked fine as well with its own superfluous visual effects on the same system)

 

Thanks for the reply firehed! How does it run when you have say 10-15 windows open? Flip 3D?

As for 0SX I always thought that if people were using the 950 in the macbooks without complaining much about interface responsiveness then microsoft should be able to do the same with aero. If you think about it with aero being such a key feature of vista and with the abundance of IGP's in laptops it's in microsoft's best interest to make aero's hardware requirements as low as possible.

There seems to be a lot of exaggeration out there about needing a really powerful gpu so I'm really interested in getting a more real world assessment of gpu needs for aero.

 

I am still trying to find compatible vista x86 drivers for my Gateway laptop with a Nvidia 6100 128MB. Im very disapointed with Nvidia's driver support on Beta testing. Same issue happened with RC2 on my desktop with a eVGA Nvidia 7800

 

I've been running Aero (no glass) on my Intel 915GM powered laptop for a couple of weeks. It's quite smooth, although I don't have the eye-candy (transparent windows, etc.) turned on.

 

If it's a GeForce IGP, then it's bound to be compatible with the drivers listed on nVidia's site atm. :\