Windows 7

[tongue_of_colicab]

Well there's something definitely wrong on your end as I know both realtek and AMD bundle their Vista/7 drivers in the same package. What driver versions are you using?



No, there is no 3D acceleration in Virtual PC if that's what you are referring to.

I am using the latest version from their websites.

I know virtualpc doesnt offer 3d acceleration but it doesnt load the driver at all so all display configurations are done with the windows driver instead of CCC. Even if there is no 3d acceleration shouldnt CCC still be loaded? I dont remember not getting driver panels in virtualpc before.

The same seems to happen with the audio driver. Win7 just refuses to detect the hardware.

 

[Kaotik]

I am using the latest version from their websites.

I know virtualpc doesnt offer 3d acceleration but it doesnt load the driver at all so all display configurations are done with the windows driver instead of CCC. Even if there is no 3d acceleration shouldnt CCC still be loaded? I dont remember not getting driver panels in virtualpc before.

The same seems to happen with the audio driver. Win7 just refuses to detect the hardware.

Was tired when I wrote what I wrote earlier.
No, you don't get CCC, you don't get anything and you're not supposed to, either, not even chipset or sound or such drivers, since the hardware you have isn't visible for the virtual pc, it has only emulated devices, excluding (depending on CPU, BIOS etc) CPU itself which can be virtualized for it.

 

[chavvdarrr]

I know virtualpc doesnt offer 3d acceleration but it doesnt load the driver at all so all display configurations are done with the windows driver instead of CCC. Even if there is no 3d acceleration shouldnt CCC still be loaded? I dont remember not getting driver panels in virtualpc before.

"The virtual machine done right" will have new version soon, with 3D acceleration (d3d+opengl) working.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Was tired when I wrote what I wrote earlier.
No, you don't get CCC, you don't get anything and you're not supposed to, either, not even chipset or sound or such drivers, since the hardware you have isn't visible for the virtual pc, it has only emulated devices, excluding (depending on CPU, BIOS etc) CPU itself which can be virtualized for it.

Well than it makes sense. I'm stupid.

 

[chavvdarrr]

http://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...ery_life_than_XP_?taxonomyId=125&pageNumber=1

Windows 7 cuts almost a third off the battery life of some netbooks shipping today with Windows XP, several recent reviews and user reports say. Laptop magazine reported in its blog on Monday that during a recent test, a Toshiba netbook lost 2.5 hours of battery life when running Windows 7 instead of XP, or about 30% (6:53 for Windows 7, versus 9:24 for XP).
Web site Tom's Hardware found last month that an Acer Aspire One netbook running Windows 7's release candidate lasted 2.5 hours less than when it ran Windows XP Service Pack 3 (5:54 versus 8:28, when both were at a low-power idle state).

 

[pjbliverpool]

Thats makes sensewhen you consider 7 is also using the GPU to render the desktop while XP is not. I bet if you turned off Aero you could get that battery life back.

 

[Tokelil]

Also MS has claimed for months that people will only see power improvements when drivers are updated. (Compared to Vista mostly.) I'd wait a few months before Id be too concerned about this and running at least RTM edition.

 

[Scali]

Also MS has claimed for months that people will only see power improvements when drivers are updated. (Compared to Vista mostly.) I'd wait a few months before Id be too concerned about this and running at least RTM edition.

Yea, I've had some strange feelings about many of these 'performance previews' of Windows 7 and whatnot.
There was also this comparison of graphics performance on tweakers.net a while ago... With Vista they installed the latest drivers for everything, but with Windows 7, they just went with the bundled drivers mostly.
Well, I had installed the latest Intel chipset drivers on Windows 7, which officially were only for Vista, but I got quite a big boost out of the graphics performance with those.
They didn't measure a difference in performance between Windows 7 and Vista, but I bet if they bothered to update the drivers, Windows 7 would have been faster, as it is on my system.

I'm not sure if Windows 7 will be as power-efficient as XP is, but the differences here just don't seem to make sense. I don't think even Vista is that much worse than XP, and Windows 7 will likely do better than Vista with proper driver support.

 

[Richard]

Having been using 7 all year I was planning a review article of sorts but our friends over at The Tech Report published one yesterday. Cyril focuses a bit too much on the 6.1 aspect than I would have, and not enough on the removal of column headers in Explorer but that article is very, very close to what I had in my mind.

 

[Kaotik]

Having been using 7 all year I was planning a review article of sorts but our friends over at The Tech Report published one yesterday. Cyril focuses a bit too much on the 6.1 aspect than I would have, and not enough on the removal of column headers in Explorer but that article is very, very close to what I had in my mind.

First really bad thing I noticed in that review was mentioning VLC, it's quality is utter crap compared to competition - which is also free and includes it's own codecs like VLC does, in other words, compared to MPC Home Cinema
edit:
Oh, and the comparison of XP AND Vista as "huge stepS", which is true only if you compare XP to WinME, compared to Win2000 XP is what 7 is to Vista

 

[Rootax]

First really bad thing I noticed in that review was mentioning VLC, it's quality is utter crap compared to competition - which is also free and includes it's own codecs like VLC does, in other words, compared to MPC Home Cinema
edit:
Oh, and the comparison of XP AND Vista as "huge stepS", which is true only if you compare XP to WinME, compared to Win2000 XP is what 7 is to Vista

Don't forget The KMPlayer

Windows 7 is very good... I've upgraded from Vista X64. It's not a revolution, but little things there and there are very enjoyable.

 

[Kaotik]

Don't forget The KMPlayer

Does it support DXVA and use of built-in and custom shaders for improved IQ? If it doesn't, I don't see a reason to remember it

 

[Rootax]

It does

 

[Babel-17]

First really bad thing I noticed in that review was mentioning VLC, it's quality is utter crap compared to competition - which is also free and includes it's own codecs like VLC does, in other words, compared to MPC Home Cinema
edit:
Oh, and the comparison of XP AND Vista as "huge stepS", which is true only if you compare XP to WinME, compared to Win2000 XP is what 7 is to Vista

With The VLC Player I found a lot of IQ improvement for low resolution videos by using DirectX video output instead of the default setting.

Go to Tools - Preferences - Video and there set the output*.

Though I usually use MPC Homecinema builds from http://www.xvidvideo.ru/content/category/1/1/2/

Interesting options, I disable it's mpeg and h264/vc1 filters and use MS's ones from Window 7 (they kick in automatically as I don't have other filters registered/installed).

A few other tweaks too.

*Aero will temporarily get disabled

 

[Kaotik]

Why the h.264 & VC-1? The MPCHC's codecs support DXVA just like MS's do

 

[Babel-17]

I'm trying them out, I like the IQ of the MS video decoder and it's pretty robust. It helped me out with a problem video.

MPC Homecinema's are also excellent.

 

[Moloch]

What's the cheapest GPU that supports DXVA for h.264 btw?

 

[pcchen]

I believe that you get reasonable DXVA support for H.264 in both G8X series from NVIDIA and RV670 series from ATI. So you can look for the least expensive card as long as it uses one of these chips. For example, an NVIDIA 9400GS or an ATI Radeon HD 4550 should be about US$45 ~ US$65. I don't know whether or when will Intel's integrated graphics support H.264 DXVA, but I won't hold my breath though.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Well, G8X doesn't accelerate VC-1. But that shouldn't be a big deal unless you're using a really crappy CPU. Compared to h.264 it's much less CPU intensive and has the same quality.

Regards,
SB

 

[swaaye]

Note that G80 doesn't fully accelerate anything. It has the same capabilities as G7x. Purevideo rev2 (G84/86) does more fully support VC-1 but not with MPCHC. Apparently it again only has partial VC-1 hardware decoding. PowerDVD supposedly will take advantage of the partial decoding capabilities of everything from NV.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_43029.html (pdf)
http://www.nvidia.com/docs/CP/11036/PureVideo_Product_Comparison.pdf

I have a GeForce 7300GT in a Athlon XP and messed around for hours trying to get it to do some H.264 assist but got nowhere. I read that you may need SSE2.