Vista - The Beginning of the End

[Daekesh]

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

Quite a good read

[Smorisha]

Yeah... I think I'll pass though.

[delling]

I'm about 10% of the way through so far... I'll try to read some more over the next few days...

[Auran]

can you give a summary?

[Daekesh]

Basically Vista cripples PCs so much to keep protected content protected (HD-DVD's and the like) that it runs very slowly.  Also, it seems impossible to actually play legal protected content on anything but £4,000 machines because they need to support certain protocols.  And if they do manage to play it then it's rarely actually in "hd quality" because some weird system in Vista actually reduces the quality and then increases it in between decoding and putting it on your screen.

Not only that, but the whole future of hardware and software is being made so that it *must* support this new DRM (digital rights management) crap which will slow every pc in the world down because, even if u dont use Vista, the hardware will still have to be designed to work with it or the hardware companies will lose a large portion of their sales.  An example being that video cards will need to reduce their graphics processing capabilities to include encryption routines directly into the graphics chips.

Another part of it is that it's being slipped in under our noses.  A very  small percentage of the user-base of Vista actually (want to) use this protected content, so only a small percentage of us will have problems - nothing to worry about for the general populus.  By the time the most people have major issues with it, it will be so entrenched into hardware and software that it will be extremely hard to remove.

[Auran]

Wow.

Vista sux.

[Cwave]

An example being that video cards will need to reduce their graphics processing capabilities to include encryption routines directly into the graphics chips.

Nowhere is stated that is the case i think?
Thats like saying my car will be slower because it has brakes included. It can be an AND processing AND decrypting case. Just an addition rather then predation.

[Smorisha]

Well curent machines work much slower with Vista and next few generations of graph cards will be gimped cause of decrypting, not saying that they will be worse then curent ones but they would be better/faster without it.

[kawe]

Wow, what a text wall.

I really hate the conept of hardware based DRM. But then with larger companies such as Warner dropping DRM from services, and stuff like iTunes providing non-DRM offerings too, I get the impression that it's catching on that people really hate DRM, and tend to pirate more because of it (I would guess; I'd rather download a 'pirated' piece of music that I can do what I want with rather than buy some crippled DRM protected thing that I can't put on xyz players etc, even if I originally had no issues with the price). I remember hearing about DRM type-stuff going to be built into things like motherboards a few years back talking about years forward, and I really hope it doesn't happen.

On the software side of things like Vista, my guess is that if it's a big enough pain in the ass, there will be people who will crack it open and (hopefully) share the love.

Regarding playback of HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs, it's really /careface for me; videos I watch on my computer are basically downloaded content. DVDs and Blu-Rays I'll wach on a TV on a PS3, and if there's some HDDVD I REALLY want to watch, well, I'll probably just watch it at a friends or whatever. But I can see how this might suck for someone who's doing the whole 'everything through a PC' approach.

Scanned through a bit more...

I resent any sizable performance loss due to vista, but on the other hand, I kind of trust CustomPC's benchmarks, which found that generally speaking that while it was slower doing 3d rendering etc, it wasn't a massive margin, something like a couple of frames per second. Neowin was reporting SP1 was out, which they said seemed to improve speed noticeably, too.

But yeah, this protected content thing blows, but I think I'm lucky enough that it doesn't really impact me personally much. If something sucks really bad, it's no problem, just either load on XP, or go buy a mac :]

[Daekesh]

An example being that video cards will need to reduce their graphics processing capabilities to include encryption routines directly into the graphics chips.

Nowhere is stated that is the case i think?
Thats like saying my car will be slower because it has brakes included. It can be an AND processing AND decrypting case. Just an addition rather then predation.

Unnecessary Device Resource Consumption

    “Compliance rules require [content] to be encrypted. This requires additional encryption/decryption logic thus adding to VPU costs. This cost is passed on to all consumers” — ATI.

As part of the bus-protection scheme, devices are required to implement AES-128 encryption in order to receive content from Vista. This has to be done via a hardware decryption engine on the graphics chip, which would typically be implemented by throwing away a GPU rendering pipeline or two to make room for the AES engine. Discarding GPU features to make way for content-protection hardware seems a sub-optimal business model for graphics device vendors.

Establishing the AES key with the device hardware requires further cryptographic overhead, in this case a 2048-bit Diffie-Hellman key exchange whose 2K-bit output is converted to a 128-bit AES key via a Davies-Meyer hash with AES as its block transformation component. In programmable devices this can be done (with considerable effort) in the device (for example in programmable shader hardware), or more simply by throwing out a few more rendering pipelines and implementing a public-key-cryptography engine in the freed-up space.

Needless to say, the need to develop, test, and integrate encryption engines into audio/video devices will only add to their cost, as covered in Increased Hardware Costs above, and the fact that they're losing precious performance in order to accommodate Vista's content protection will make gamers less than happy.

The burden that the content-protection overhead places on resources is even more severe for portable, battery-powered devices. As a CNET review of portable devices found, “DRM not only slows down an MP3 player but also sucks the very life out of them”, with the extra overhead of processing DRM'd content shortening the battery life by about 25% across a whole range of products. This burden extends beyond DRM'd music into games as well. For example the content-protected version of the game Flatout 2 runs 15% slower than the same game without content protection.

That clearly states that there is a need to remove 'speed' from the chips to accomodate the extra DRM stuff.  Did you read it?  Did you even read the bit right at the very top where he actually talks about ppl commenting without reading it?

To use your example, a car with DRM would be like a normal car, except you can't push the accelerator all the way down because that extra power is reserved for something else that you'll never use.

[Cwave]

Did skim all of it. Missed the actual examples of performance loss.
Actually have flatout2 and 15% performance loss is just silly! Code better or remove the requirement for the drm

To use your example, a car with DRM would be like a normal car, except you can't push the accelerator all the way down because that extra power is reserved for something else that you'll never use.

Depends on what the extra is reserved for. But yeah, sound like alot of failed steps into this "need" for AES keys into GPU's

Actually DRM into stuff like this is not a bad thing imo. Retarded implementation however is.

[kawe]

that 15% can't be right, going by benchmarks of games XP ->vista that have been seen thus far.

[Daekesh]

Code better or remove the requirement for the drm

This is microsoft we're talking about...

that 15% can't be right, going by benchmarks of games XP ->vista that have been seen thus far.

He's probably just using a worst-case example to show the extreme damage it's *possible* to cause!

[Cwave]

Code better or remove the requirement for the drm

This is microsoft we're talking about...

that 15% can't be right, going by benchmarks of games XP ->vista that have been seen thus far.

He's probably just using a worst-case example to show the extreme damage it's *possible* to cause!

But if its not causing that in every day use, spouting 15% is kinda....

[Daekesh]

Well, it's causing 15% to one game, why can't it do that in the future to other games?  Other, more popular games?  I mean, if when you test a new drug, it kills 1in1000 people, that's clearly ok, because, u know, it's only 0.1% of them?