What's everyone take on Vista now its out and OpenGL

Been looking at moving to Vista and not sure if I should go 32bit or 64bit, I play games and code. I see ATI has NO drivers, and Nvidia has some beta drivers…

What is beta about Nvidia drivers? They are WHQL. I use Vista for about two weeks, since it was available on MSDNAA and I am very happy with it. Oblivion runs very fine (but doesn’t like the Vista sidebar) but crashes when I exit the game, which is no big deal. I haven’t use OpenGL on Vista yet, but I plan to toy with it on weekend, compare performance and such.

Ah beta is for 8800 series and Vista 32/64bit. Sorry I didn’t specify

For me OpenGL has been working quite well under Vista and a 8800 GTX. (Of course I’ve had Vista G80 drivers for quite some time :wink: .

I’ve ran Doom 3 and not only does it run well, everything looks good too. I havn’t done a lot with the G80 extensions on Vista yet, but what little bit I have it worked well.

Hey SirKnight is that 64bit Vista?

I wonder if anyone can speculate as to what causes this reported result:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=354&type=expert&pid=9

The only OpenGL game I tested for this article, I knew that the results for Prey performance were going to be interesting. Here in my NVIDIA testing I found that performance with the 7900 GTX was pretty good under Vista, falling only about 3 or 4% at 1600x1200. The 8800 GTX also does just fine at 1600x1200 under Windows Vista, but beyond that it’s a nightmare. At the 2560x1600 resolution, where we used to be able to play the game fine under Windows XP, Vista performance is 37% slower on average with a 60% lower minimum frame rate. Obviously, OpenGL performance under Vista is something that needs dramatic work from NVIDIA.
Given the low performance at higher resolutions, my guess is that Aero reserves a significant amount of videomem and GL can’t force it out, even temporarily when a GL app runs out. I guess that makes some sense when windowed, but not for full-screen.

Is this something we’d want to address with NVidia or MS, esp. after the campaign to regain full GL performance?

I hope not. I thought that Nvidia and ATI were supposed to be able to side step AERO and take control 100% and allow GL to run full speed… But again this maybe just drivers that aren’t 100% yet either.

Originally posted by Cyranose:
Given the low performance at higher resolutions, my guess is that Aero reserves a significant amount of videomem and GL can’t force it out, even temporarily when a GL app runs out.
and do you think a dx app will suffer from the same problem- or will the retaining of system resources (if that’s really what causes the low performance) be limited only to opengl programs?

Well so far I have Vista now and GL running just fine except for some bugs Nvidia has to fix with GL2.1 that I have found. Also performance, could be better but its not dog slow by any means just not as fast as XP for now. If anything I have had a few crashes from playing a DX9 game in Vista and no crashes from using GL in Vista.

I tested on a recent Dell desktop with a Quadro FX 3400 card.

Using XP Pro and the latest Quadro driver I benchmarked my app at around 50-60 fps with everything turned on at around 1920px.

I then installed Vista 32bit clean on the same machine. I installed the latest NVIDIA Quadro FX vista driver. Now my OpenGL app runs around 20-30 fps with hiccups (pauses for 2-3 frames) every second or so.

I’m assuming this is because the Quadro drivers for Vista are still being optimized. I’m definately watching for the next Quadro driver release to see if it helps.

Unfortunately the high-end Quadro drivers don’t seem to be getting the same attention as the GeForce drivers. The last release for the Quadro was Jan 5 instead of Jan 31 for the 8800.

I got a question about OpenGL and Win32 with Vista. I want to make a map editor with Win32 and GL will GL emulated by DX with a window or did that get changed so it will run with the ICD from ATI/Nvidia? Thanks

RigidBody,

I don’t know the cause and can’t currently verify their benchmark. But, no, not necessarily. I can imagine a situation in which DX-mode would allow swapping out of system texture data whereas GL would not. It depends on who sets the policies and/or low-level API. But I can imagine other causes for those symptoms besides video memory too – a slow path for swapbuffers(), for example. But this apparent stuttering, if true, sounds more like a resource scarcity issue.

This is all to say, I’m looking at the symptoms only (and 2nd hand) and guessing causes from that. Ultimately, the driver-writers will have to address these sorts of issues or tell us why it can’t be done.

The general consensus is: Ask again in another 9 months.

I’m running OpenGL (with FBO and Vertex/Frag Progs) on a triple-booted system: Vista, Fedora6 and Ubuntu/Dapper.

Ubuntu is running 15x faster than Vista and Fedora is running 10x faster. I suspect that the Vista driver is running in emulation mode - even though glGetString reports an nVidia card. Not sure why Ubuntu would be so much faster than Fedora - I’m using the same nVidia driver on both:

OpenGL installation: 2.1.0 NVIDIA 97.55
NVIDIA Corporation
GeForce 6800 GT/AGP/SSE2

Originally posted by Mars_9999:
I got a question about OpenGL and Win32 with Vista. I want to make a map editor with Win32 and GL will GL emulated by DX with a window or did that get changed so it will run with the ICD from ATI/Nvidia? Thanks
Have you seen this?
http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_7/

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