GF2 MX 400 / XP = No acceleration.

I am having a problem with one of my testers not getting hardware acceleration on his system. He has a GeForce2 MX 400 and is running Win XP. When I enumerate all of the supported pixel formats, every one comes back with the PFD_GENERIC_FORMAT flag set, meaning no acceleration (and just to make sure, if I go and set the pixel format and create a rendering context, I do in fact get the GDI renderer). He has tried this in 640x480x16, as well as a few higher resolutions, with the same results.

I have asked him to let me know what version drivers he has, so maybe that’s the problem, but doesn’t WinXP come with an OpenGL driver for the MX cards? He has D3D 8.1 working, so he obviously has at least some form of the nvidia drivers.

Does anyone have any suggestions what could cause this? How is it possible to get the card working in D3D 8.1 but not OpenGL. And does XP support OpenGL on these cards out of the box? I’ll post more info when I get it later today, but I kinda want to proactively get other people’s input on this.

From what I’ve heard, the drivers that come with WinXP does not support hardware accelerated OpenGl! Just another M$ ‘feature’ :wink:
Just get the latest drivers from nVidia and the problem should be solved.

Anders

Yes, I planned on having him update the drivers, but I wanted to understand how he could have a problem with such a card in the first place. If it was a bug in my software, I wanted to find it and fix it rather than mask it with newer drivers. However, if that is correct, and XP just doesn’t come with OpenGL drivers for a GeForce card, that would be pretty sad.

winXP has automaticly OpenGL in HW when there is a DX support, because they use a DX-to-GL wrapper when there are no GL drivers.(wasn’t here a therad about it ?)

maybe this feature could cause some problems ?

But from what I have heard, it isn’t a full fledged wrapper. XP only uses the wrapper for certain applications, or something strange like that.

Tell him to download the NVidia drivers for his card, remove the XP drivers and install the NVidia drivers instead. XP complains that it “knows its drivers are better” but if you ignore that, the NVidia drivers work well. I got my stepfather’s machine working this way for a month before he got fed up and ditched XP and went back to ME. He had the very same card.

Sure enough, it was the default XP drivers. That really surprised me, because I would have thought they would be installed automatically. I guess they really only wanted Direct3D to work right out of the box. Microsoft is so cruel to us.
Thanks

But surely they would have got the drivers from NVidia? So why did NVidia not include their ICD in the driver pack they must have given MS? Maybe MS told them not to include it…which is bloody weird of them…don’t they care that the simulation sector is using NT5 boxes more and more these days? If they carry on with these tactics then they’ll lose those customers…rather than persuade them to port to d3d.

But if it has a DX wrapper, shouldn’t it run at decent speed?

Unless if it is using the software MMX , or ramp or whatever its called.

Used to be that you had to install the latest drivers, otherwise you get some generic vga.

V-man

Like I said, from what I have read, the wrapper is only invoked for certain known games. It was definitely not being invoked for my app. I was getting the “GDI Generic” driver.

The DX OpenGL wrapper will only become available to games using the Quake series of engines, or who load the OpenGL driver in exactly the same way. I believe they did this because it catches 90% of the apps that a regular consumer will actually try to use that would otherwise break after an upgrade to XP.

Shipping real ICDs would have been so much better, I think. But: whatever. At least XP has correct AGP drivers for more chip sets than Win2k (or, shudder, Win98).