Originally posted by: Nomada
That seems to be the direction they are heading with Longhorn. I've heard that when you load a game it will strip itself down to the bear minimum so as to keep specs to the min. Can't say I buy it though.
It has to do with the GUI. I beleive this is what they are talking about.
The GUI is based on 3d stuff and if your using all the eye candy then your going to be depending on 3d card for a lot of it.
You do things like off-screen rendering of the individual windows then placing them together in one seemless image on your desktop. Composition, basicly. This way the 'window' is just a texture on a 3d primitive that can be manipulated, resized, moved around, and have special effects on it unlike what you can do when you have to render each window indivdually on the screen.
This is what you do in OS X and how they are able to have special effects like Expose'. Linux can do it too, right now, if you have new enough versions of your software and have it configured correctly.
All this uses massive amounts of video card memory, ram, lots of cpu time sometimes, and lots of video card power sometimes. This is why even low-end Macs come with decent video cards, unlike the 'Intel Blaster Extreme' stuff you get with low-end Wintel machines.
When you go to full screen then all this eye candy is turned off.
That's already what is done anyways.
So it's not a big deal, but it's something that sounds impressive at first.
All OSes dynamicly adapt to cope with different loads. Linux, Windows XP, Windows 2000, OS X, whatever. It is just how it goes. You have memory management, and different scedualling priorities, and window events and stuff like that.