Our friends at the Tech Report have an interesting article on-line tonight (or this morning depending on where you're from!) investigating the effect Windows Vista's Aero interface has on power consumption. As most of you probably know by now, Aero required a DX9 class video card to render properly, so even while sitting at the desktop your GPU is being put to use...
"Much has been made of Windows Vista's new Aero interface, and for good reason. The GUI is loaded with luscious eye candy, including the liberal use of transparency, and even a few 3D effects. That eye candy doesn't come cheap, though. Aero relies on graphics hardware to accelerate the interface, and requires a DirectX 9-compatible graphics card that supports Shader Model 2.0 and has at least 128MB of memory. Those requirements are pretty steep for an operating system, but they also raise an interesting question: if Aero is accelerated with graphics hardware, will system power consumption rise as a result? We decided to test and find out."
In TR's quick tests, it appears enabling the Aero interface doesn't effect power consumption all that much. It would be interesting to see if power consumption with Aero scales differently at excessively high resolutions versus classic mode though, because the Aero interface reportedly requires much more frame buffer memory than the classic interface as resolutions increase. Ehh...one more thing to try out when I get around to installing Vista!
Marco Chiappetta
Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com
