Despite Intel pitching integrated video to as many OEM's and office environments as possible, it's pretty apparent that Vista is going to require quite a bit more than that. A large majority of PCs in use today in offices use integrated video, a lot of e-machines, lower end whiteboxes, many Dells and a lot of other computers out there make use of integrated video as well, usually an Intel or a SiS chipset powering it. With Microsoft recommending discrete cards, DX9 support and at least 64MB of memory, a lot of people will apparently not get the beauty that Vista packs in the form of the new GUI effects, Aero Glass.
"However, analysts say the cutoff point for running Aero Glass is likely to begin with only today's latest and thus highest performance integrated graphics chip sets, including models such as ATI Technologies Inc.'s Radeon XPress 200, Nvidia Corp.'s nForce4 and Intel Corp.'s Intel 945 Express, which arrived in desktop PCs last May and will ship for notebooks in January."
The industry got off pretty easy with XP, with the majority of machines running Windows 98 or 2000 able to handle XP, occasionally a RAM upgrade required. With Vista that just plain won't be, and I suspect that for true balance, overall the average desktop computer is going to need to get beefed up. Good? Bad? Conspiracy? The market will decide.