Super-phat video cards mandatory

Here's what he said, more-or-less verbatim (we left out boring bits).

"Video is probably the most critical hardware item for Vista. Things have changed very significantly.

"There's a completely new driver model in Vista called the Longhorn Display Driver Model – LDDM. There has been an explosion in the capabilities of graphics chips – they're almost universally 3D vector graphics now – and the driver model today we have is bitmap.

In Longhorn we are switching from drawing bitmap graphics – dots - to vector graphics – lines and shapes. Rather than painting these bits on the screen, we are now asking the GPU to paint a circle. That means you can scale pictures up and down to an infinite degree and they won't go furry on you.

"One of the things you'll notice about Vista beta 1 is that it runs dramatically quicker than Windows XP. The reason is the GPU is now doing a lot of work that the CPU used to have to do. There are a couple of gotchas though. The GPU needs a very high speed bi-directional bus to communicate with main memory. That has not been the case in the past, and what it means is that AGP will not be optimal.

"The reason is that one of the things the LDDM can do is allow a video card to back stuff off into the PC's main memory if it has a particularly intensive task and needs the video RAM to work in. That's an intensely bi-directional type of communication.

"The GPU will need a plenty of room to operate in Vista. The more memory you put on a video card the better really. We want the least dumping back to main memory because that's slower than graphics. If you have 128MB that's good, if you have 256MB that's better, but I expect that video card memory will go up a lot when Longhorn is released.