You complain that Dreamscene doesn’t work on your ‘uber’ monitors at your ‘uber’ resolutions, and make a crack at Ultimate for not being so Ultimate.

However, the reality is not a problem with Dreamscene, your problem is that you are using crappy video cards.

From: http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/c9c423ac-c343-4694-9408-877631d810b51033.mspx#EW

–I get the message, “Windows DreamScene cannot run because the total desktop size exceeds the primary video adapter’s maximum texture size.”

How come you didn’t explain this to your users or even provide this link to help inform them? Are you slipping and really don’t know or are you purposely trying to mislead people?

It concerns me, because your blogs and videos over the past few weeks are completely riddled with inaccurate statements and factual errors. A lot of stuff I see novice users calling you on, let alone someone that depends on their ‘tech’ reputation.

So you are ‘dissing’ Dreamscene for not being able to run on your system, when in reality the reason you can’t run Ultimate Dreamscene is because you are using underpowered video cards that don’t support a maximum texture size for the resolution of your displays.

How are hardware limitations of the Video cards you are using a MS problem?(Side tip, DX9 hardware doesn’t inherently doesn’t have a very large texture size, and why they developed DX10 to offer a rather large GPU texture specification.)

I would bet my desktop display is close to double the pixels you are pushing from looking at the specs of your monitors, and Ultimate Dreamscene works just fine, and runs on every monitor.

You have ventured into the journalism side of the tech industry, but seem to fail at the ‘journalism’ part. Even if you offer ‘opinion’ pieces, you should at least do some research and not just flip out content like, ‘wow this is cool’ or ‘wow this sucks’ when you really don’t even know what you are talking about.

Additionally you also say…
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I’m not so sure I’d want a motion background sucking away extra CPU cycles?
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Ok, don’t most tech people realize that 1) Most Video cards made in the last 10 years hardware accelerate video decoding, especially MPEG2, and newer cards do VC1(WMV). So even playing at 1080p video as a desktop background consumes less than 10% of the CPU on medium end systems even when pushing a HD desktop background. (And that is a lot of processing and pixels, and there is also no reason you can’t use one of the MPEG2 videos at a slightly lower resolution to have virtually no CPU cycles in use.)

You do realize that this is a yielded process, not only on the CPU but with Vista new WDDM GPU scheduling system even on the Video card itself. This means that if ANY application or even GAME wants more CPU power or GPU power, the dreamscene either pauses or reduces frame rate to give the cpu/gpu cycles to even the most intensive application. This means it NEVER slows down your computer or what you are doing, and provides a fluid desktop experience when you are doing normal computing tasks.

I often play games in a Window on the desktop and set my game to be 80% transparent so that I can see the animated Dreamscene wallpaper behind my game as I play, and even this might take 1FPS away from the game. (And this is with either an OpenGL or DirectX9/10 game.) So for someone to purport it is a CPU waste, just doesn’t understand what they are talking about.

I could understand complaints if it was draining laptop batteries, but it pauses when you go to battery (even though you can override this setting.)

Have a look at what’s been happening lately:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4Fbk52Mk1w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ImW0-MgR8I

These effects will ship natively in Ubuntu 7.10 due this month on the 18th

It’s a desktop animation, unless you have a magical computer blessed with the divine, don’t use DreamScene.

if there is a way to set affinity on that application and you have multiple cores, I would do that. Since Vista doesn’t appear to use more than 1 core.