Transparency effect

[Guest]

Now that I've been trying Vista out for several weeks, I've gotten interested
in the aero part of it. My own computers have video cards that don't have
any drivers for Vista aero and I'm not really inclined to replace them just
to get aero. I paid enough money for them and they still work quite well.
Then I started seeing posts about secondary programs, lots of which are free,
that give you somewhat the same effect in XP and I've even seen some using
them in Vista.

I've downloaded a couple of them and I do get the transparency in XP and
even Vista without aero gives you a transparent sidebar and around the icons
on your desktop. I even found a free program that creates the transparent
border on firefox. I know that they are saying that your video card needs
pixel shader 2.0 or better to get aero. Anyone know why that is so and why a
lesser pixel shader can't do aero?

My question is why can't we get transparency with these video cards in Vista
but can get it with third party software? Are they really incapable of the
aero effect or is it that Microsoft and the video card manufacturers just
would like to see us buy new video cards. I don't know how that would
benefit MS but it would definitely benefit the video card manufacturers.
Until I know that ATI can't write a driver for my video card that would
achieve the effect in Vista, I'm not inclined to give them anymore of my
money.

My video card is the 8500LE, and yeah, I know it doesn't have pixel shader
2.0.

 

[Richard Urban]

Pixel Shader 2.0 is a video card specification. The add-on programs/apps you
see are not using Pixel Shader 2.0, and could care less about it.

If they do what you want, be happy - but they are not the same, just the
same effect.

--

Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[Rafael Rivera Jr. [Windows Live Butterfly]]

Hi,

I'm not sure on the specific reason but pixel shaders are way more efficient
for the in-use blur effect(s) than writing a bunch of C++ code. Pixel Shader
1.4 only lets you play with 22 maximum instructions while 2.0 offers 96,
which is probably why 2.0 is required.

That all said, if they wanted to support older generation hardware, I
suppose they could've just used PNGs and alpha layers or some sort of
primitive transparency... which is what your third party applications are
doing.

Side note -- I'm sure someone could write an emulation layer to
execute/compile 2.0 shaders at a software level, ignoring the obvious
performance hits.

 

[Travis King]

There's also free software to get window shadows, and you can customize the
shadow. It works on XP, but I haven't tried it out on Vista. I highly
recommend if you use it to disable the shadow effect when dragging windows
or your dragging window performance will be terrible. I recommend an AMD
Athlon XP or Intel Pentium 4 or higher for good performance with this. I
don't see any option with this software that allows you to start it up
automatically when Windows starts, but you can add it to the startup folder
to make it do so.
You can find it here:
http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/Yz-Shadow-Download-1330.html