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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

I just don't understand how if Visa could render its transparency efects smoothly on Intel 920 grade GPUs with 128mb of ram.

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That's not how I remember it. Back in the day the first thing you did was disable the Aero stuff to claw back some performance on Vista.

That said, who knows how efficient the implementation is compared to other changes in iOS 26. I turned liquid glass off with "reduced transparency" because even 1% extra battery usage for it would be too much even though I kinda appreciated the new look.

>>That's not how I remember it. Back in the day the first thing you did was disable the Aero stuff to claw back some performance on Vista.

I remember it being kinda like placebo - you did, you marvelled at how much faster it's working, but in reality nothing changed. I really liked the look, and it did run smooth unless you had something below the minimum spec(which a lot of people did at the time).

Vista problems were largely nvidia driver crashes and low spec machines. Otherwise vista was fine.

Yes, though I think it worth noting that at that point "low spec machines" was like 80% of laptops and maybe 50% of desktops. It also really hurt when you went from XP which ran great to Vista which noticeably dragged on your machine.

My friend had an Alienware laptop which absolutely screamed with Vista

I mostly disliked Vista for a number of reasons, but the looks were incredible. I was actually blown away at the beauty

I liked aero too, XP was too fisher price.

XP Media Center Edition had a pretty slick theme, not at all toy-like. To say nothing of the Metro interface in its titular app, though it seems Metro was kind of a dud when they tried to apply it to other apps.

Vista did translucency and a statically positioned reflection mask, whereas this glass effect involves refraction/tinting that samples from surrounding surfaces.

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