All Vista World

Vista Power consumption

Theres an article at Dennis Forbes’ site about Vista power consumption when using the new Aero Glass skin :

One of the major new features of Windows Vista is the Aero Glass experience (both as an API for applications, and the shell itself). Aero Glass in essence turns your desktop into a video game: Instead of the current model where the GDI draws on a 2D palette, updating the video card memory (making using of acceleration routines that the video card supports) only when changes occur, the model of Aero Glass is that of a traditional game: With every “frame” the scene is wiped clean and re-rendered from scratch, layering “textures” that represent application canvases on onto 3-D polygons and building the user experience from there.

This system will attempt to push 60-90FPS of user experience goodness through your video card.

In many cases this will max out even high end video cards. Even where it doesn’t, all of the shaders and T&L engines on the video card are engaged - the additional power consumption will be considerable.