Neoseeker has posted a report from the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference

ATI and Nvidia of course had their booths but we've seen ample coverage of their products in the last couple weeks so it was a bit muted especially since it was primarily an engineering event. VIA/S3 had their set top box running at the show as well as their PCI Express based DeltaChrome and we have a couple shots of both products. The real meaty part of the conference though are the graphics requirements for Longhorn- DX9 GPU minimum and the fact that their GUI quality will scale significantly with hardware.

"Aero

- Requires a DX9 GPU
- Requires at least 32 MB of VRAM
- Minimum Resolution is 1024x768x32
- AGP 4x for both integrated and discrete solutions

Machines that do not have these specifications will not be certified as Longhorn Approved (basically product suicide for anyone silly enough to release non-certified components at that point)"

That's one of the two GUI modes that Longhorn will support; the second mode which we also cover in the article requires a significantly beefier setup that may factor into graphics hardware purchasing decisions even now.

Read more