Don't Disable Aero For Increased Performance

[Guest xiphi]

But what about games? Is the UI still drawn (but not visible), does it load it to the memory, in any case isn't it better to turn off aero if you are gaming?

I've learned having DWM enabled or disabled has little to no effect with gaming. That said, I believe it gets disabled when in full screen on some games, but the transition is so quick you don't notice it was disabled. There is an option to have it disabled when launching certain programs through the Compatibility options in the Properties dialog.

[Phenom II]

AMD Fusion disables aero - they obviously think it reduces system load

[capr]

by disabling aero do you mean turning off the theme's service that runs and sucks up a ton of memory? i think with lowend builds that have loweish memory turning it off does actually help them. yeah they are putting more pressure on the processor as you said but at least they have some ram free to run more tabs in a browser.

[DaViD_BRaNDoN]

Have always enabled Aero cos Basic/Classic is a bag of hurt

[Guest xiphi]

by disabling aero do you mean turning off the theme's service that runs and sucks up a ton of memory? i think with lowend builds that have loweish memory turning it off does actually help them. yeah they are putting more pressure on the processor as you said but at least they have some ram free to run more tabs in a browser.

DWM taking up 8MB of RAM is not a "ton of memory". Your argument fails especially if the systems are using WDDM 1.1 drivers.

[x-byte]

Luna (XP Themes Service) still put very minimal strain on the system.

Especially with a driver that supports hardware acceleration.?

But what about games? Is the UI still drawn (but not visible), does it load it to the memory, in any case isn't it better to turn off aero if you are gaming?

Aero is disabled when running fullscreen applications.

[soldier1st]

Especially with a driver that supports hardware acceleration.?

Aero is disabled when running fullscreen applications.

and aero stays disabled till the full screen app is closed so there is no overhead if any, it's just making use of a resource that we should have been able to use before but couldn't.

[PreKe]

Doesn't Microsoft recommending turning it off on low-end PCs?

[Kpssst]

Doesn't Microsoft recommending turning it off on low-end PCs?

Low-end PCs would likely have a low-end graphics card that would not be able to run Aero effectively. This is mostly the situation to which this would apply. If you got a compatible graphics card, you should take advantage of Aero.

[soldier1st]

Doesn't Microsoft recommending turning it off on low-end PCs?

they probably do, if the pc can't handle Aero then it gets turned off but if you got a gpu that can handle it then why not take advantage of it,it's like extra free offloading at no extra expense

[notuptome2004]

My Mothers PC is a dated 2200+ 1.6ghz athlon XP system and i just put a PCI based 8400 in the system for her and windows 7 runs flawlessly with Aero enabled on it.

now when ya turn off aero no matter how good your system is you get UI Lag and tearing effect or if you all remember the multi-copy window effect when somthing stops responding or the driver has a small glitch or something and ya get a white space in places where an application may have been but is not now or when ya drag another window around ya get duplicat version of part of that window erasing the blank white space area . all these issue are common with Microsofts old Windows GDI API or Win32 API and all of these issue are still presented in todays system when running Non Full Aero Ui

[PGHammer]

Performance should be a bit better (probably not noticeable on a recent CPU) but if you're using a portable you'll lose a bit of battery life (not a lot though)

The performance issue is *highly* GPU-dependent. Older *portable* GPUs (especially those based on Intel Bear Lake or the nV/AMD equivalents) were not really designed to take advantage of Aero; fortunately, the onboard GPU of the past year (from all the players) has vastly improved in this area. nVidia's ION (common in netbooks), Intel's own X/G4x series, and AMD's HD4200 Mobility take few steps back compared to desktop equivalents.

Generally, if a GPU is designed around DX10 or better, leave Aero settings alone.

[PGHammer]

Especially with a driver that supports hardware acceleration.?

Aero is disabled when running fullscreen applications.

Depends on the application.

Some applications (mostly older applications) are not designed to support Aero when run full-screen. (While Office 2003 falls into this category, Office 2007 and later do not.) The few *games* the issue affects are, like the offending applications, largely designed around older performance metrics.

[Tews]

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[Subject Delta]

I believe if you have a WDDM 1.0 Graphics card (IE not DX 10.1 capable) surface textures for DWM are stored in system memory, rather than graphics memory which means you may see a possible performance benefit from disabling the service, especially if you have 1GB of memory or less.

Also, with a WDDM 1.1 card, surface textures are stored almost entirely in graphics memory, so if you have a large amount of windows open, you may see a performance boost from stopping the service if you want to play a game, however under normal usage circumstances I would advocate leaving it on.

However, on a modern system you're not really likely to notice a great deal of performance difference between off and on.

[threesixtyflip]

Yeah I knew this, I mean come on, im running at 1080i with Aero, and DWM is only using 11MB out of my 3GB :)

I feel its actually slower when its off because I hate the way that GDI+ calls are not hardware accelerated like they were in XP under Vista and 7 IIRC. Which to me, sucks :p

[Rix]

Wow. Seen this thread on the main page and decided to check it out.

Glad i did, had no idea this was the case.

Had it disabled on my HTPC for general speediness ect. It's mainly running XBMC 24/7 and downloads.

But it looks really ugly if i use it for web browsing or something.

Although I didn't notice a difference in speed when i disabled it, it's nice to know i can have it looking pretty and speedy (Having my cake and eating it, so to speak)

[Ambroos]

You get the highest performance from using Aero with Shadows, Transparancy and Animations disabled. Known this for a few years now, it's pretty obvious too.

[Salty Wagyu]

I have to disable Aero when I want to watch a movie on the TV. It reduces the judder a bit, noticeable on camera panning scenes.

Either Aero isn't perfect or Nvidia's Dual Display is crap when I enable my TV on it.

[Fred Derf Veteran]

I would point out that if your system responds slowly then Windows 7 will prompt you to disable Aero.

This has only ever happened to me once and that was when resuming from sleep with a heck of a lot things in memory.

[CATTANK]

Aero is disabled when running fullscreen applications.

This is not true, it all depends on the calls being made through WDDM by the application which is running full screen whether windows decides to turn of transparency or not.

I don't have any proof, but run two monitors side-by-side, launch a full screen app and see what happens to an open window on the other screen. :shiftyninja:

Also in terms of performance, I recently had to build an image for a poor model of netbook, I left Aero enabled but turned off transparency, and removed all of the nifty little features like window animations (minimise/maximise etc). This helped immensely (also displaying windows search and other heavy services helped a lot)

[bjoswald]

If you want to increase performance, have your game (or other full-screen app) disable themes and/or glass effects. Disabling Aero will cause problems.

[muratoner]

left 4 dead 2 crashes after a while if i don't disable aero.But this is probably because of the unsigned themes patch i did.I always switch to classic before gaming

[amon91]

left 4 dead 2 crashes after a while if i don't disable aero.But this is probably because of the unsigned themes patch i did.I always switch to classic before gaming

Right-click the app > Properties > Compatibility > Disable Desktop Composition. That will automatically turn off aero whenever you launch it (and turn it back on when you quit it).

[muratoner]

Right-click the app > Properties > Compatibility > Disable Desktop Composition. That will automatically turn off aero whenever you launch it (and turn it back on when you quit it).

i'll try that.thanks