Have we reached that point?

[amdfangirl]

But, that's not what I do. Using painter X requires at least 1Ghz dual-core or a faster otherwise there will be lagg of 5 seconds after I put pen to tablet.

 

[merlinbadman]

I don't know. My Core i7, 6GB RAM, Raptor HD, Vista 64 really isn't that snappy at all.

I dont know why your PC is running slow. I have the same spec (inc raptor) and my system is blazing fast, no lag at all.

 

[Reynod]

It is all about I/O ... but I am sick of explaining it to people.

Nobody listens.

/goes back to listening to the matresses flooping ...

 

[MU_Engineer]

Now that we are moving to 20GB bandwith caps, that will take care of itself in short order. I fully expect bandwith caps to shrink the internet by 20% or more, and with a lot less bandwith consuming sites.

20 GB per month is about 650 MB per day or 7.8 KB/sec 24/7. The Flash, Javascript, and ad-heavy "Web 2.0" stuff won't come close to that figure. Neither will e-mail or the amount of HTTP/FTP file downloading most people do. Streaming music won't either, unless you stream 128 kbps music for more than 12 hours a day. What will go over those limits in a hurry is watching a lot of online video, videoconferencing, and peer-to-peer applications. The cable ISPs *hate* online video and want to quash that, while the DSL ISPs *hate* any sort of online voice/video communication and want to quash that. Both hate P2P due to the fact that they'd have to upgrade their networks to really deal with it and they don't really like being bothered by the MAFIAA lawyers.

And for the record, embedded systems have had multithreading support for multiple CPU's for ages; the system I work with, all I have to do is one command in software for 85%+ scaling.

Basically any OS except for Windows and MacOS has supported SMP for quite some time.

We have reached a point though, where diminishing returns will cause us to hit a brick wall with what we can do grapically (which I personally hope will force companies to improve game physics in the meantime).[/quotemsg]

/goes back to listening to the matresses flooping ...

I don't even want to know

Bah...overkill! Sempron LE-1100 at 850MHz/0.8volt ftw. It runs my Media Center PC (although it will clock up if it CPU load is >80%)

Bah, that's all overkill. My laptop has a C2D T7250 running at 600 MHz (100x6) at idle, down from the stock 800 MHz (8x100.) All SpeedStep-aware P6-class mobile chips I've encountered have a lower multiplier of 6x and the GM45 chipset drops the FSB down to 100 MHz yet for some reason the default idle on this chip is 8x100 rather than 6x100. I simply adjusted the EIST settings to correct this. However, Intel has locked the idle Vcore (Vcc_SLFM) at 0.850 volts, so I can't undervolt it any

 

[GNR]

Vista is not a hog at all.

Any CPU with 2 threads (HyperThreading or Dual core) with 2GB of RAM is enough for Vista.

You need to have a CPU like that for Vista, because it uses a different process (different thread) for Sound and Graphics mixing. (dwm.exe for graphics, audiodg.exe for audio).

In XP those processes were part of the kernel, and they couldn't split to other cores.

Any single core CPU will run slow with Vista but on other CPUs Vista is going to be more responsive than XP.

Vista needs more RAM because it uses a compositing manager (all textures are stored) and has HQ artwork (XP uses .ico files that were 32x32 or something).


I have connected my Intel Atom (HyperThreading) netbook with a 22' Monitor running Vista, and for normal desktop usage I see no noticable difference to my desktop Quad Core PC. The only thing that can slow things is the hard disk, as notebook ones have slow response times.