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well just so you guys know the icons wern't the only thing updated, there is FINALLY a high resolution boot screen that matches the resolution of your desktop... be prepared for a suprise there ;)

Source? And how would it match the resolution of the desktop considering there is a limit of 256 colours to start with.

I understand they wanted consistent branding on the 'Windows' applications (translucent frames and flowers), but i kind of liked most of the old ones better, just because they were simpler.

they're not changing the monitor icon (as seen in the sidebar) are they? is that just for the sidebar icon?

has how the sidebar icon appears in the system tray different now, btw?

Source? And how would it match the resolution of the desktop considering there is a limit of 256 colours to start with.

The source doesn't need to be disclosed... as for the color limit, they completely reworked the boot screen process.. it is no longer limited at all, they load the graphics drivers first now, then show the boot screen, unlike before where it showed a limited common SVGA screen mode which only supported 256 colors... so now your boot screen will be like in Mac OSX where the resolution for it matches the resolution you specify as your desktop res

Source? And how would it match the resolution of the desktop considering there is a limit of 256 colours to start with.

Also, just to be clear: resolution and color depth are not the same. Resolution = # of pixels; Color depth = # of colors. So a high-res display could have a low color depth and vice versa.

The source doesn't need to be disclosed...

Then we don't to believe you (even though I do). You can disclose your general source without being specific. (ie "I got it from someone who works at MS")

The source doesn't need to be disclosed... as for the color limit, they completely reworked the boot screen process.. it is no longer limited at all, they load the graphics drivers first now, then show the boot screen, unlike before where it showed a limited common SVGA screen mode which only supported 256 colors... so now your boot screen will be like in Mac OSX where the resolution for it matches the resolution you specify as your desktop res

Well we would like a source to where you got this info. For all we know you could be pulling our leg and telling us what you'd like to see in vista.

Well we would like a source to where you got this info. For all we know you could be pulling our leg and telling us what you'd like to see in vista.

I don't want to get someone fired for leaking info, all I will say it is someone close to the UI code for Vista

well just so you guys know the icons wern't the only thing updated, there is FINALLY a high resolution boot screen that matches the resolution of your desktop... be prepared for a suprise there ;)

It's about time. I don't understand why they haven't done this earlier. Is it hard to load the graphics drivers early in the boot process?

The source doesn't need to be disclosed... as for the color limit, they completely reworked the boot screen process.. it is no longer limited at all, they load the graphics drivers first now, then show the boot screen, unlike before where it showed a limited common SVGA screen mode which only supported 256 colors... so now your boot screen will be like in Mac OSX where the resolution for it matches the resolution you specify as your desktop res

That sounds great, but wouldn't this kind of stuff be required to be in public test builds (RCx builds) so that it doesn't break apart various PC configurations?

That sounds great, but wouldn't this kind of stuff be required to be in public test builds (RCx builds) so that it doesn't break apart various PC configurations?

MS thinks not, it's one of the reasons we've seen those "placeholder" boot screens that were really just black with a progress bar in the old format, they pulled out the old images, and started to put in the stubs and interfaces for the new boot process, guess its just one of those things they wanted to keep secret until RTM to give people a suprise like the sound scheme and new icons.. the whole boot process in the beta's was just a place holder pretty much, they had new boot code for almost a year now, and have been testing it for over 2 years... as a "lab" so its been pretty well tested...

So just wondering... since you know someone in the UI department, any word on the motion desktop? Did it make it for RTM? I mean we heard one of the labs was working on it but no real definitive yes or no from last i knew....

I'm kinda super excited if they really are gonna pull off the full res / color depth boot process.... but im secretly hoping its also full motion to put apples little apple to shame hehe

Now I heard one of the new bulids features a whole new set of icons. I was over at Paul's site and found this graphic:

post-123716-1162235261_thumb.jpg

Could these be some of the new icons?

I like most of the new Vista icons, but those ones look like they were designed by Elton John. I think you all know what I'm implying...

This is making me really really laugh.

I can give you an easy source for the the fact that the bootloader contains support for more than 256 colors.

It's called load the freaking nogui option for the boot screen and you'll get a true color "aurora" static shot.

I mean come on guys this has been in there for well over a year now.

This is making me really really laugh.

I can give you an easy source for the the fact that the bootloader contains support for more than 256 colors.

It's called load the freaking nogui option for the boot screen and you'll get a true color "aurora" static shot.

I mean come on guys this has been in there for well over a year now.

You make me laugh, its 256 selective palette not True Colour....

You make me laugh, its 256 selective palette not True Colour....

Really? Evidently you haven't checked it properly.

It's 32bit alpha'd

Go back and play in your sandbox.

Also you can just hibernate the system and bring it back to see that it's not just 256 selective or otherwise.

you couldn't do all those shades, selective or not.

i do think vista will have a 32 bit boot screen....it's like 5 years from xp ....and they had the time to develop 10 boot screens ,not only one ...so it will be 32 bit for shure ... :D

I agree, and the fact they have kept it secret so long (kinda like motion desktop) just raises awareness of the fact its still not seen....

personally it would be sick to see something like the energy screensaver (modified of course) during boot

no they are making it for men and women without the need to overdose on testosterone lol wow the little screen in the icons has some countryside flowers, youd prefer megadeath perhaps? Its called icons that suit the general population without offending or displeasing any one set of people... flowers are pretty general guys may not specificlaly get gleeful at them but they arent gonna feel sick over them either.

Really? Evidently you haven't checked it properly.

It's 32bit alpha'd

Go back and play in your sandbox.

Also you can just hibernate the system and bring it back to see that it's not just 256 selective or otherwise.

you couldn't do all those shades, selective or not.

Post the actual Aurora screen, because I could swear the shading looked like this (this is NOT real, just a quick three minute job done in PSPX):

post-99705-1162419739.png

Are they making OS for girls, and gays? :blink:

:huh: I have absolutely no idea how a mix of blue and green, rampant glassiness, plus an icon with flower, has anything to do with girls and gays.

Unless you think everything must be manly by having a monotone coloured OS. :rolleyes:

it's common knowledge that orange is gay...let alone orange flowers. Obviously they should have made an icon set with just female butts and genitalia. Since hormonal teens and immature adults are the only ones that use computer's that would have been everyone happy. oh wait...

:rolleyes: seriously can people stop calling icons "gay"

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    • AMD RX 9070 GRE AI, Blender benchmarks vs 9070 XT, 7800XT, Nvidia RTX 5070, 4070 by Sayan Sen Earlier this week, we shared the first part of our review of AMD's new RX 9070 GRE. It was about the gaming performance of the GPU, and we gave it an 8 out of 10. As a follow-up, similar to how we did with the 9070 XT and non-XT, we are doing a dedicated productivity review for the RX 9070 GRE as well, where we compare it against the 9070 XT, 9070, 7800 XT, as well as Nvidia's 5070 and 4070. This will include AI, rendering, compute, and more benchmarks. AI performance, especially, is a very important metric in today's world, and AMD also promised big improvements thanks to its underlying architectural improvements. We will be pitching it against the data we already have for the RX 9070, and RX 9070 XT, but also the Nvidia 5070 FE, MSI GeForce RTX 4070 VENTUS 2X 12G, and Gigabyte Radeon RX 7800 XT GAMING OC 16G as they are in a similar price class, but also because we do not have a comparable 5060 Ti card lying around here that we can compare it against. Before we get underway, this is a collaboration between Sayan Sen and Steven Parker, who lent me his test bed. Also, there was no editorial input from AMD. First up, the specs of the RX 9070, 9070 XT, and 9070 GRE, which were given to us by AMD: Radeon RX 9070 GRE Radeon RX 9070 Radeon RX 9070 XT Boost Clock: Game Clock: up to 2.79GHz up to 2.20GHz up to 2.52GHz up to 2.07GHz up to 2.97GHz up to 2.40GHz Stream Processors 3,072 (48 CU) 3,584 (56 CU) 4,096 (64 CU) Ray Accelerator 48 56 64 AI Accelerator 96 112 128 ROPs 96 128 Texture Mapping Units 192 224 256 Memory 12 GB GDDR6, 18Gbps Clock, 192-bit Bus 432 GB/s 16 GB GDDR6, 20Gbps Clock, 256-bit Bus Effective Memory Bandwidth: 640 GB/s Infinity Cache 48 MB (3rd Gen) 64 MB (3rd Gen) Card Bus PCI-E 5.0 X16 Output 2x HDMI 2.1b 2x DisplayPort 2.1a Power consumption 220W 304W Recommended PSU 650W 750W Slot width 2x 3x Price (SEP) $549 $599 As you can see from the specs above, it is less than the standard RX 9070 in every way that counts, except for slightly higher Boost and Game clock speed. Design Moving on, the RX 9070 GRE we were given is an XFX Swift triple-fan, dual-slot design with two 8-pin connectors. At 30cm (self-measured), it will fit in most systems easily. There is no RGB either. The AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE by XFX from all angles. Test system Our test system consists of the following: Lian Li O11 Dynamic Mini V2 Flow (Amazon|Newegg) ASUS Z890 ProArt Creator WiFi (Amazon|Newegg) Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus (Amazon|Newegg) Thermal Grizzly KryoSheet - 44x37 (Amazon|Newegg) 2x 16GB G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB (7200 MT/s in XMP) (Amazon|Newegg) Sabrent Rocket4 Plus 2TB SSD (Amazon) Windows 11 25H2 (Build 26200.8246) AMD shared a press driver based on the recently released Adrenaline 26.5.2 that we were required to use. We now move on to our benchmarks. First up, we have Geekbench AI running on ONNX. For some reason, the 9070 GRE does exceptionally well here in both half-precision (FP16) and single-precision (FP32). It manages to beat the RTX 5070 and RX 9070 non-XT, and is only behind the 9070 XT. Since Geekbench runs in short bursts instead of continuously hammering the graphics card, it seems the GRE's faster boost clocks are helping here. Next up, we move to the UL Procyon AI test suite, starting with the image generation benchmark. We chose the Stable Diffusion XL FP16 test since it is the most intense workload available on Procyon. The Nvidia cards do very well here, as even the 4070 out-muscles AMD's best fairy easily. The positive thing about the GRE is that it gets quite close to the 9070 non-XT in this test; this indicates that the VRAM does not play a very big role here, as SD XL relies on float16 (FP16). So this is something to keep in mind again. If you wish to work with float32 AI workloads, graphics cards with larger than 12 GB buffers would likely emerge as victors. Regardless, the gains are still massive on AMD's 9000 series compared to the 7000 series. Following image generation, we move to the text generation benchmark. This is one test where the 9070 GRE struggled, quite a lot. It seems that the 12 GB VRAM and lower memory bandwidth of the new Radeon 9070 GRE are hurting it quite a bit; the split is massive, especially in a test like Llama2, which packs 13 billion parameters. As such, in all the tests, the 9070 GRE is the slowest of the lot. Next, we tried Blender, and here the AMD GPUs were beaten by Nvidia. Rendering is something the Green team has always had a lead over the Red side, and it has not changed so far. On the positive side, though, the 9070 GRE shows significantly better results than the 7800 XT, which means AMD is on the right path. Catching up to Nvidia, though, will require a lot more effort. And we hope HIP and ROCm can keep improving. Wrapping up AI testing, we measured OpenCL throughput in the Geekbench compute benchmark. The RX 9070 GRE alongside the 9070 did not fare well here at all, even falling behind the 7800 XT. Interestingly, even the RTX 5070 could not beat the 4070 on OpenCL, so perhaps this suggests that OpenCL optimization may not have been a priority for either AMD or Nvidia in the modern era. Conclusion We reached the end of our productivity performance review of the 9070 GRE, and we have to say it's a mixed bag. Unlike the 9070 and 9070 XT, the GRE excels in some areas while losing ground fairly easily in others. Similar to how it happened in gaming, any time the card's memory subsystem gets hammered, it tends to fall behind the others. This was the case with text generation, wherein we saw the VRAM sometimes hit its maximum available 12 GB of usage with larger model sizes. So what do we make of the RX 9070 as a productivity hardware? It can certainly be used, but you have to know it has its limitations. For those looking for a GPU that can deal with more, AMD recently unveiled the Radeon AI PRO R9700, which is essentially a 32 GB refresh of the 9070 XT with some additional workstation-based optimizations. On a similar note, the new Ryzen AI Halo platform is something you can consider if you want to set up a local AI processing station. Considering everything, we rate AMD's Radeon RX 9070 GRE a 7.5 out of 10 for its productivity performance. Price is less of a factor for those looking at productivity cases compared to those considering the GPU for gaming, and as such, we felt it did quite decently on many occasions and can be handy if you need a 12 GB GPU and, for some reason, don't want to get Nvidia. Purchase links: RX 9070 / XT / GRE (Amazon US) As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
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