Roughly half of today's PCs won't be able to take advantage of the "Aero Glass" compositor found within Microsoft's upcoming Vista software, due at the end of this year.

The estimate was one of the conclusions cited in a report released late Thursday by Jon Peddie Research, which used the same year-end data to conclude that Intel's share in the graphics market is steadily decreasing.

The fault, Peddie reported, was that the low-cost integrated graphics controllers customers have chosen process the 2D windows of Windows XP and Windows 2000 just fine, but lack the bells and whistles necessary to process the Windows Desktop Compositing Engine used in Vista. About 63 percent of the 203 million PCs sold used an integrated graphics controller, JPR reported.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1925173,00.asp

I believe you'll still be able to use Vista, just in a lesser version. In order to fully use the new Windows Operating system we apparently all 3d video cards.

Which, will most likely look pretty good, but when a operating system eats as much resources and requires as much power as Vista is going to I'm curious as too how much is going to be needed to run the next generation of Windows Apps on it :s

Well, I've skipped the last 2 upgrades...will probably be missing that one as well.

Microsoft hopefully will have a lot of trouble with this release of windows....they need to get their head out of the @#$ and realize people don't always have the money to upgrade that much hardware.

It's often not a matter of money, as an internal need/desire to push forward. Look how Doom or was it Quake required special video cards to play it. Now, it's a standard. Apple got grief for dropping floppys off their macs, yet now how many of us use floppies? I'm using cd/dvd and more often a thumbdrive to move stuff.

One or even two things is okay...but upgrading RAM, graphics card and other things that you know will have upgrade along with those things...that seems a little bit of overkill in the need to progress forward. That is going to be one hell of a cost for businesses that want to upgrade....

Which is why they won't. I'm aware of several who are still running Win98 boxes locally to me. My last employer upgraded to 2000 kicking and screaming, and refused to go any higher. That was 2 years ago. LOL