Well, if this review stands for anything?
It appears that VISTA "suspends" AERO-GLASS on your desktop into the background & while you full-screen game (this "exclusive mode" they're talking about I am guessing), you don't take a MAJOR performance beating!
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QUOTE:
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_vista_aero_glass_performance/page4.asp
FiringSquad: We ran some benchmarks with Aero Glass on and off and noted no performance difference when using Catalyst 7.1! Normally under an OS you see a slight 3-5% performance hit when you turn on the eye candy, but that wasn’t there under Aero Glass which was definitely surprising. Do you think the new driver model helps Aero Glass performance or is it something else?
Andrew Dodd: Basically (pretty much because of the new Vista driver model) the Vista OS just suspends Aero in the background, (once you enter 3D exclusive mode it would be a waste of GPU resources to keep running Aero). So that’s why there’s no performance impact
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(My guess is VISTA probably shuts it off nearly completely, leaving only a "stub" of it in memory & pages out what resources it took up temporarily to the pagefile.sys would be my guess - & heck, since it's "DirectX 10" driven anyhow, the vidcard most likely handles a good 90% of it anyhow, so temporarily suspending AERO GLASS would have the effect they stated/illustrated, leaving the GPU to the game, period/"exclusively")...
* I'd be happy about that, especially ATI vidcard using folks...
APK
P.S.=> I have NO idea if the folks from the site noted for this test are "crooked" or not, but it seemed like a decent enough review, upon "cursory examination" on my part so far @ least... apk