Vista games performance

Stephen

Oh dear. Stay away from Vista for now if you want to play games. I had it installed for the last few days and was getting less than 20fps in day of defeat source, where I used to get a solid 60 (capped by vsync).
This is using the latest nVidia drivers. Hardware is as follows:
Intel E6600, stock speed
2GB DDR2
Abit AB9 Pro
nVidia 7800GTX/256MB

Running the game at my screen's native resolution, 1680x1050 with all the bells and whistles (4xMSAA, HDR, etc) turned on. Even when I turned off all the fancy stuff, I was only getting about 5fps more.

I don't know if its down to nVidia's vista drivers being crap, or down to vista itself. Either way, the game (day of defeat:source) was unplayable.

I've now reinstalled Windows XP.

cashman

Howcome there are no Vista drivers on the Nividia website for the 8800 series graphics cards? I hope there will be soon because I want to test my geforce 8800GTS on Vista.

8T8

Drivers performance are all over the place at the moment. I have seen cases where it is way slower a little slower and a little bit faster than XP depending on the game.

NVIDIA & ATI have had 4+ years to fine tune drivers under XP & are making a mad dash trying to get drivers up to scratch for Vista which has a completely new driver architecture.

NVIDIA will be releasing "official beta" drivers on the 30" of this month & after that there will be further release that will improve performance/bug fixes etc.

That includes GeForce 8 drivers as well for DX10 usage at the moment their are leaked Forceware 100 series drivers for Vista that some are saying work well but are by no means bug free in short wait till the official drivers.

Of course with any new OS and a new driver system you are going to be on the bleeding edge of things, in time given a few months drivers should get a lot better and in the long run Vista should be faster than XP when it comes to playing the same title on identical systems.

Edit: HardOCP has some news that a Forceware 100.54 driver has been released to developers/testers under NDA a signed version of his driver is probably what might come out a few days from now. It support GeForce 8 cards under DX9 & DX10 but no SLI support yet, they mention 3D performance has been significantly improved over the Vista Forceware 95 series drivers for Direct3D titles so its now on par with XP however OpenGL is still stuck in the mud.

mick.fr

This is normal your games are slow.

The default 3D engine on Windows is now DirectX. No more OpenGL.

So if your game has been written on OpenGL it will be slow. Now to make a game working properly on Vista, an OpenGL game would have to be rewritten to use the new Microsoft API to return OpenGL code to DirectX through a wrapper.

So yes will have to wait a bit to get your favourite games back on Vista.
The good thing is they should run even better than before on XP.

So as you can see not much an issue with your video driver :-)

8T8

mick.fr wrote:

This is normal your games are slow.

The default 3D engine on Windows is now DirectX. No more OpenGL.

So if your game has been written on OpenGL it will be slow. Now to make a game working properly on Vista, an OpenGL game would have to be rewritten to use the new Microsoft API to return OpenGL code to DirectX through a wrapper.

So yes will have to wait a bit to get your favourite games back on Vista.
The good thing is they should run even better than before on XP.

So as you can see not much an issue with your video driver :-)

Wrong on all counts :rolleyes:

* The games in the OP was a source based game which uses Direct3D part of Direct X not OpenGL.

* The OpenGL issue you refer to longer exists in Vista Microsoft changed the underlying system to make OpenGL work so now games do not have to go though a wrapper for full speed OpenGL. This is achieved by using an OpenGL ICD just like in XP but ATI & NVIDIA need to rewrite it for Vista this will obviously take a little time to get working properly. OpenGL is barely used by PC gaming industry any more so their priority is on Direct3D for now.

* The issue is a case of drivers not the OS, the wrapper only kicks in for those graphics cards who do not supply an OpenGL ICD in their driver.

Mojito

cashman wrote:

Howcome there are no Vista drivers on the Nividia website for the 8800 series graphics cards? I hope there will be soon because I want to test my geforce 8800GTS on Vista.

You can get the leaked 100.30 vista drivers at guru3d.com

I've been running Windows Vista and all my games run perfectly at the max settings on my 8800GTX.

mick.fr

8T8 wrote:

Wrong on all counts :rolleyes:

* The games in the OP was a source based game which uses Direct3D part of Direct X not OpenGL.

* The OpenGL issue you refer to longer exists in Vista Microsoft changed the underlying system to make OpenGL work so now games do not have to go though a wrapper for full speed OpenGL. This is achieved by using an OpenGL ICD just like in XP but ATI & NVIDIA need to rewrite it for Vista this will obviously take a little time to get working properly. OpenGL is barely used by PC gaming industry any more so their priority is on Direct3D for now.

* The issue is a case of drivers not the OS, the wrapper only kicks in for those graphics cards who do not supply an OpenGL ICD in their driver.

Ok my bad my info was based on Beta versions and partial OpenGL support has since been implemented in VISTA (RTM).

OpenGL support is done by IDC as you are saying which is for instance making the OpenGL calls to the DirectX ones.
Plus Vista is only supporting OpenGL 1.4, newer features comprised in OpenGL 1.4+ have to be accessed as extensions. Some delays in calls ?

About some points you made I disagree.

- OpenGL is the industry standard used by everybody else (Sony, Nintendo, Linux, Unix, Apple, 3D software...).
DirectX is the Microsoft implementation of OpenGL but OpenGL is more advanced in term of features. DirextX 10 is a big improvement, but still lots of things needs to be done.

DirectX is the Mirosoft response to try to heradicate Open Source entertainment.

It also seems ATI stopped OpenGL support completely. To be confirmed.

It also seems NVIDIA has already released their new Vista drivers including OpenGL. To be confirmed.

Stephen

All this openGL stuff is irrelevant at the moment though, as it was a DirectX 9 game that I was playing! The vast majority of PC games are implemented using DirectX nowadays anyway. Yes, OpenGL would be lovely for interoperability with other systems, but it seems fewer and fewer windows games are using it.

8T8

mick.fr wrote:

Ok my bad my info was based on Beta versions and partial OpenGL support has since been implemented in VISTA (RTM).

OpenGL support is done by IDC as you are saying which is for instance making the OpenGL calls to the DirectX ones.
Plus Vista is only supporting OpenGL 1.4, newer features comprised in OpenGL 1.4+ have to be accessed as extensions. Some delays in calls ?

No, no, no the Vista display path & display manager supports hardware accelerated OpenGL ICD's from ATI & NVIDIA there is no conversion or wrapping taking place into Direct3D. The OpenGL 1.4 support is for software based OpenGL or fall backs if the vendor does not supply an OpenGL ICD of it's own.

mick.fr wrote:

- OpenGL is the industry standard used by everybody else (Sony, Nintendo, Linux, Unix, Apple, 3D software...).
DirectX is the Microsoft implementation of OpenGL but OpenGL is more advanced in term of features. DirextX 10 is a big improvement, but still lots of things needs to be done.

No again, Direct X is a library of API's to create games, Directsound, DirectInput, Direct3D etc OpenGL is a 3D API (nothing more) and Microsoft certainly did not copy the OpenGL API as Microsoft have been in the driving seat for 3D tech for years while the OpenGL ARB twiddled its' thumbs.

OpenGL is not more advanced in terms of features it is all things considered now about on par with Direct3D 9 API & thanks to NVIDIA resting control from the ARB and transferring control over to the Khronos group it's future is in better hands. Direct3D 10 is more advanced than the OpenGL 2.0 API & it will be a while before you see OpenGL extensions that can make full use of the technology Microsoft helped create in Direct-X 10.

mick.fr wrote:

DirectX is the Mirosoft response to try to heradicate Open Source entertainment.

There is no open source computer entertainment industry so that is irrelevant & porting from the Direct3D API to the OpenGL API is trivial. Microsoft many many years ago evaluated several different API's to chose from and went with one it could better mould to it's own operating system rather than relying on third party API's. Those API's evolved into what is now known as Direct-X.

Microsoft has never restricted use of OpenGL in any games in fact it is supported by Direct X guess what games like Prey or Quake 4 use alongside OpenGL for the sound, control etc you guessed it Direct-X. Guess what even with the games for Windows program that Microsoft is promoting with Vista you can still use OpenGL as the 3D API and still get games for windows certification.

OpenGL is important & has it's use the workstation/professional market and in scientific areas that is not an area where Direct X competes or is even intended for or Microsoft has any interest in.

mick.fr wrote:

It also seems ATI stopped OpenGL support completely. To be confirmed.

Complete and utter rubbish you have no idea what your talking about seriously stop.

mick.fr wrote:

It also seems NVIDIA has already released their new Vista drivers including OpenGL. To be confirmed.

According to the info the OpenGL portion still isn't ready even if present.

mick.fr

Yeah almost true 8T8 and also there was no need to insult me.
The fact that you roughly know something is ok, we all do not know everything about everything.
But when you do not know something there is no need to be so means.

art

mick.fr wrote:

Yeah almost true 8T8 and also there was no need to insult me.
The fact that you roughly know something is ok, we all do not know everything about everything.
But when you do not know something there is no need to be so means.

Browsing over the last few days, I've noticed you have posted completely erroneous information on these boards more than once. Don't post things that you are unsure of as though they were facts, it is not helpful to anyone and, understandably, will start to get right up people's noses the more you do it.

8T8

Precisely art.

All I'll say further mick.fr is that if you are going to post misinformation or FUD then prepared to butt heads against others correcting you.