Vista and OpenGL

[Armored_Spiderman]

dont know if it has been already posted....if it was..sorry....but here is a interesting headline on OpenGL.org

http://www.opengl.org

"Microsoft has enabled support for OpenGL ICDs that work with the Windows Vista compositing desktop, as of the February preview build. This is taken from a Microsoft blog: "Windows Vista ICD's - this is a new path for 3rd party ICD's introduced for Windows Vista that will work in a way that is compatible with desktop composition. Essentially allowing direct access to the GPU for hardware accellaration, but then having the final surface that appears to be the front buffer to the application actually be a shared surface that gets composed by the DWM". This means that the OpenGL API and the Aeroglass window manager will work in harmony and fully accelerated once the hardware vendors get their Vista ICDs written and released.
Kudos to all developers who contacted their ISVs/HSVs to ensure that OpenGL was fully supported under Vista. You made the difference."

http://blogs.msdn.com/kamvedbrat/archive/2006/02/22/537624.aspx

it seems that the OpenGl support on Windows Vista problem has been solved... :smile:

 

[Richteralan]

dont know if it has been already posted....if it was..sorry....but here is a interesting headline on OpenGL.org

http://www.opengl.org

"Microsoft has enabled support for OpenGL ICDs that work with the Windows Vista compositing desktop, as of the February preview build. This is taken from a Microsoft blog: "Windows Vista ICD's - this is a new path for 3rd party ICD's introduced for Windows Vista that will work in a way that is compatible with desktop composition. Essentially allowing direct access to the GPU for hardware accellaration, but then having the final surface that appears to be the front buffer to the application actually be a shared surface that gets composed by the DWM". This means that the OpenGL API and the Aeroglass window manager will work in harmony and fully accelerated once the hardware vendors get their Vista ICDs written and released.
Kudos to all developers who contacted their ISVs/HSVs to ensure that OpenGL was fully supported under Vista. You made the difference."

http://blogs.msdn.com/kamvedbrat/archive/2006/02/22/537624.aspx

it seems that the OpenGl support on Windows Vista problem has been solved... :smile:

This is a nice news to know:smile:

 

[Graham]

Ok I didn't see the previous replies when making my last post (was reading page 2, didn't see 3)

ok.
On my machine, I would say that performance in vista beta 2 (the latter build) is currently slightly better than my XP install. This I would likely put down to it being vista x64, and xp 32. My machine is a 4200x2, 2gb ram, raid0 WD raptors and an x1800, so I'd expect it to make better use of the hardware.

Simple things like navigating in explorer seem far better optimised for ignoring hardware related delays (waiting for the cd drive to spin up to get an icon, whilst locking up the app no longer seems to occur).

Boot time is about 50% longer, this i consider to be excellent for a beta. Also given that it's highly likely most of the code is probably debug code too. However, the system performance monitor warns me that my USB drivers are significantly delaying boot time (one of the nice new things in vista), from what I can tell the OS reported this to MS, it also warned that explorer.exe and the media centre client was stalling the log on process.

General responsiveness of the UI is fantastic, thanks of course to the hardware acceleration. Avalon, er, WPF apps are very nice. There are definitely some bugs still, especially in the VDDM drivers from ati (I would guess) but they definitely run *much* faster than the WinFX beta 3 for winXP.

Memory usage wise, yes, everything is using more memory. Frankly I couldn't give a damn about this, as soon as I move to x64 permanently I'm upgrading to 4 or 8gb anywho. The difference is fairly trivial anyway, it just seems vista keeps more memory out of swap pages. The total seems to be around 20% higher than xp.

As for performance hits to windowed applications, If you read the DirectX 9L documentation, you will see there are extensions in place for rendering thread priority, so if you set a higher than normal priority, I would expect you to get pretty much identical performance compared to full screen. The only problem of course maybe memory limitations, but with vista's significantly improved graphics memory management this likely won't be an issue anyway.

Overall I'm very pleased with the beta. The thing is though, 90% of all the *really* cool stuff won't become visible until vista-only applications appear that start to really exploit it. Just like the win 3.1->95 change, most people originally thought it was simply a cosmetic advance. But underneath it all it was the move from win16 to win32, and that change was huge. I get the feeling win32->winFX will be even bigger (and I'm really really looking forward to exploiting it - particularly WCF).

 

[ANova]

There are aspects of the OS that are quite a bit slower than XP, and there are those that are quite a bit faster. I'm sure it will be faster overall when it hits RTM, the question is how much so and will they fix all the bugs.

I also don't consider the ram usage to be a problem. I currently have 25 processes running in XP with 675 MB of ram, in Vista the available ram was exactly the same even with 40+ processes running. The only difference is that it seems to use quite a bit more pagefile, but than applications seemed to run fast regardless, faster even than in XP.

 

[KimB]

Yeah, well, I currently have 66 services and 1.3GB of RAM used in SuSE Linux 10.1 beta6

Of course, most of that memory usage is from the HD cache...

 

[one]

This is a nice news to know:smile:

OpenGL says thank you Vista :smile:

 

[Richard]

I guess 6 months really wasn't enough.

EDIT: Dave already posted this here: http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=29345