Vista and HD movies on GMA950s  

Well, if you're planning to use Vista's built in player it will use DX10; nothing you are buying will be DX10 compatible so it will emulate, an that will slow things down a bit. Will it affect HD playback? Who knows? Also, the resolution for full HD... is your system going to support it? Probably not.

You also won't get full Vista Visual material with the equiptment tou are looking at due to DX10.

Even the 6100, 6600 or X700 is not DX10 compatible.

DX10 only comes into play when you are rendering 3d. DVD playback is 2d, so I don't think it will be a problem as long as your laptop supports the necessary screen resolution for HD.

I don't know anything about the Vista visual effects, so I can't speak to that, but my z63a with the GMA900 plays DVD's very well. I can only assume this one will be better since its the next generation.

The graphics card will not affect videop playpack. I used to watch movies on my P3 toshiba with an ancient 8mb dedicated card no problems. I'm sure the newer 950 ill do movies, even HD movies, without a glitch.

Now as I understand it, Vista will have DX10 embedded into the OS for all the eye candy and windows is recommending a 256mb graphics memory in order to use it all. Whether a dedicated card or integrated card with that much ram will be enough is hard to say right now until it is released and people actually start using it. Either way, there should be a way to disable it whe using a pc with an older/insuicient gpu to handle it all.

The x200, being an integrated card as well, is only marginally better than the older intel integrated cards, but I don't know how it stand up to the newer one.

According to ATi, The X200 doesn't support Windows Vista even without the Aero glass mode.. The minimum ATi card that supports Vista is the X300 and it's a horrible horrible card.. The Nvidia 6200 is also very crappy.. I'd recommend a X600 at LEAST... But who knows what you might really need :S

Vista will need more resources over all, if you're getting a low end notebook you might want to stay away from it.

Maybee its a stupid question but when is vista released?

Thinking about buying a notebook and if it will come during the summer then i can wait and get a copy of vista with it.

Q1 2007 or if they screw things up even more at redmond then Q2 2007.

And before you say anything about hd playback go try the 1080p trailers at
quicktime.com, my inspiron 9300 with 1,76Ghz PM and X300 couldnt do them.

May want to check your information: http://www.ati.com/technology/window.../Products.html We have a saying at work, If you're not sure about the information/answer, don't give one.

Vista will run HD videos just fine on the GMA 950, which will also support Aero glass. Running Vista, I downloaded some of the 1080i HD WMV files from Microsoft's site and tried them full screen in the DivX player running at SXGA+ (1400x1050) and it ran smooth, with the CPU around 35-45% (I have a Core Duo T2500, 2GB DDR2-667, and a Seagate Momentus 7200.1 100GB hard drive).

As of the last official Vista beta build (5365), Aero glass support still needs some work... it is possible to get it to run, but with some glitches, but I'm sure it'll be working in the end (Intel has plenty of time to keep up with MS, that's for sure). Since you're not going to be playing games, the GMA should be OK for you. If will be playing games, you have to get separate graphics- that has nothing to do with Vista.

HD clips should play from even the slowest hard drive. Even a heinously pokey drive has a transfer rate much faster than the bitrate of a video clip.

Dual vs. single core shouldn't matter, as I am fairly certain that the decode process for the video is singlethreaded.

Are HD clips decoded in hardware or software? Right now I'm watching an xvid clip, which is supposed to be a fairly expensive format to decode computationally. It is using around 13% CPU at 800MHz of an Athlon 64 (playing on mplayer on a Linux system--don't know how other decoders compare). Given that HD clips have about 10x more pixels than this xvid clip to deal with, we're looking at roughly 1000 MHz of Athlon64-equivalent to decode an 1080p HD clip in realtime. Since video decode uses integer operations, if I recall, the Athlon 64's superior floating-point performance gives them no real advantage, and any Pentium M/Athlon/Turion/whatever in the >1.6 GHz range should be able to decode HD in realtime in CPU.

Are you retarded?

I said The Ati X200 card doesnt support windows vista, even the minimal part of it without the eye candy.. And I don't see it posted on that link. You must be retarded.

Probably should have mentioned it, but my notebook is a Toshiba M400 Tablet. Yes, it has Intel Integrated graphics, and my experience was running the default drivers with Vista build 5365. I was running the videos in landscape mode.

As for the Vaio it's possible there were some other I/O factors involved- 512MB seems a little low these days. Also, a 1.7GHz P4 is probably half the performance of a 2.0GHz Core Solo chip (the chip outperforms my desktop AMD 3500+ by at least 20% in most synthetic CPU benchmarks- even SuperPI which is not multithreaded).

With Integrated Graphics, you *must* have more RAM and CPU power; that's why I upgraded to 2GB DDR2-667 and paid for the extra bump to 2 GHz (I think the default configuration is 1.66).

Core Duo would significantly help if something else was running on the computer, but I can say that when checking Task Manager, the DivX player was apparently using both cores. In fact, running Divx on my desktop (an AMD 3500+ with a GeForce 6800 Ultra, XP SP2, 2GB of low latency RAM), I can see the player uses 34 threads when playing. I don't know the details but they may be doing something. Interestingly, on my first try of the "Coral Reef Adventure" video, I got some jerkiness in the playback on my desktop machine that I never saw on the M400.

Check the attitude at the door. We're talking notebooks here. When talking about notebooks, we abbreviate Xpress 200 to X200 or X200M, even LG does it in their specs (see below). You must of been looking under desktops. Under mobile, it lists "ATI Radeon® Xpress 200M" Under Chipsets, it lists "ATI Radeon® Xpress 200." Go to HP's page for the v2000z, It will say, "Supports Windows Vista with 512mb" for my notebook. LG's Specs: LE50 Intel® Celeron® M 360 1.4 400FSB 1024K Processor ATI® RS400MD Chipset,RADEON™ X200M 128MB Shared Graphics 15" XGA 1024x768 TFT LCD,1 x 256MB DDRII533 SO-DIMM 40GB 4200RPM HDD,DVD/CD-RW Combo Drive,SD Card,PCMCIA 4 USB,1394A,VGA,S-Video TV Out,10/100 LAN,56K Modem Microsoft® Windows® XP Home,Nylon Back Pack Again, before you insult someone, perhaps you should check your information. You've been reported.

Glad to help.

For the record, I tried some of the Apple 1080p HD videos on my M400... had to install Quicktime 7.0.4 (i.e. no previous decoder). Most are 1.85:1 and others are 2.35:1, which is probably less of a strain because even full screen they scale down and take up not as much screen area. All ran smoothly on my M400.

In fact, they ran much better than on my desktop, which has a BFG nVidia Geforce 6800 & AMD 3500+ ... imagine that. I probably have to look into what's going on there, but I think that makes us 100% sure that the grade of video card is not the difference. Not that I would mind a new ATI board with H.264 hardware acceleration if someone gave me one for free.