[neoterran]

The reason why OpenGL was not ever officially supported by Microsoft was because of Direct3D. Direct3D is Microsoft’s driver model whichis intended to make OpenGL unnecessary. However many games and applications use OpenGL even today. With Windows Vista, Microsoft made it clear that OpenGL support would only work as a layer sitting on top of Direct3D. There was going to be translation involved and thus, a performance hit.

This week the Khronos group, which is responsible for developing and maintaining OpenGL, has released a report indicating that OpenGL support will now be natively supported in Vista without layering over Direct3D. Using standard Windows installable client driver (ICD), OpenGL will be fully accelerated and be fully compatible with Windows Vista's Aeroglass UI. In fact, Khronos says that by the time Windows Vista ships, Aeroglass performance on OpenGL will be superior to that of Direct3D. According to Khronos and NVIDIA:

    * Hardware overlays are not supported
    * Hardware OpenGL overlays are an obsolete feature on Vista
    * ATI and NVIDIA strongly recommend using compositing desktop/FBOs for same functionality

However, the OpenGL ICD drivers must still bedownloaded and will not ship on the Windows Vista installation disc. Khronos said that NVIDIA already has a beta 2 ICD OpenGL driver available and ATI will release its own soon. If no ICD is present, Windows Vista will rely on thelayered OpenGL mode by default and only offer basic functionality.

Source: http://dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3760

This is very good news indeed...

[Kazan]

nvidia, ATI and the OpenGL maintainers give Microsoft The finger... good

[achtung]

Wee!

[pecenipicek]

hmmm.... interesting.


whats the minimum recommended rig for Vista?

[Kazan]

whats the minimum recommended rig for Vista?

A Pentium 2 300 would take care of all the actual useful execution, but you need a dual core 2ghz+ processor to run it

[Mars]

whats the minimum recommended rig for Vista?

A Pentium 2 300 would take care of all the actual useful execution, but you need a dual core 2ghz+ processor to run it

Saves up pennies for a Athlon 64 X2 to replace Athlon 3200

[Polpolion]

whats the minimum recommended rig for Vista?

A Pentium 2 300 would take care of all the actual useful execution, but you need a dual core 2ghz+ processor to run it

Really? Wow! What a waste! [not sarcastic]

[neoterran]

That's not true. the absolute minimum specs are :

800 Mhz Modern Processor (Athlon / PIII or better)
512 MB of Ram
30 GB Hard drive space

for Aero Glass :

1 Ghz CPU
1 GB Ram
128 MB Direct x9 capable graphics card (SM 2.0 or better)
60 GB HDD
DVD Drive

[neoterran]

I should point out that the latest builds (5506 +) are running very well indeed

Vista doesn't look much different really, but it has so many useful improvements technically, that it really is going to be a big improvement for windows users in many different ways. Just go look at the  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista

This feature alone is worth it, IMO :

Previous Versions automatically creates a backup copies of files and folders, with daily frequency. When the user right-clicks on a folder and selects "Restore previous versions", it shows multiple versions of a file throughout a limited history and allows the user to restore, delete, or copy those versions (this feature is available only in the Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista).

[IceFire]

We ran Vista Beta 2 on my brothers Athlon 64 3700+ and it was sluggish.  Workable but sluggish.  Not a good gaming platform for instance.  I'm hoping that the final version of Vista is the pinnacle of Windows performance...because it'd be nice...and its possible.

I'm pleased to see OpenGL continue to be supported completely.  I don't care much if I need an ICD for it to work or not because if you're doing anything with OpenGL you've probably already got any one of those now hundreds of models of video cards from ATI or nVidia that already ship with OpenGL ICD's in driver packages.  This is a big thumbs up...also good because many game designers get to keep that solid possibility of crossing over toh MacOS or Linux or anything else they want that uses OpenGL.  This is good!

I'll be taking a very long wait and see approach with Vista.  Its got to be just as efficient as WinXP and with better features, more stability, and more security or I'll have a hard time switching.  I noticed with WinXP that the same computer ran WinXP better than Win98 and that made me happy. I'll be hoping for much the same with Vista.  If not...I'll wait a while.

[Mars]

That's not true. the absolute minimum specs are :

800 Mhz Modern Processor (Athlon / PIII or better)
512 MB of Ram
30 GB Hard drive space

for Aero Glass :

1 Ghz CPU
1 GB Ram
128 MB Direct x9 capable graphics card (SM 2.0 or better)
60 GB HDD
DVD Drive

Well that's better, to be honest though, I see no reason to go to Visa, most of the games I have run just fine natively on Ubuntu, and the ones that don't work fine in WINE.

[pecenipicek]

I should point out that the latest builds (5506 +) are running very well indeed

Vista doesn't look much different really, but it has so many useful improvements technically, that it really is going to be a big improvement for windows users in many different ways. Just go look at the  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista

This feature alone is worth it, IMO :

Previous Versions automatically creates a backup copies of files and folders, with daily frequency. When the user right-clicks on a folder and selects "Restore previous versions", it shows multiple versions of a file throughout a limited history and allows the user to restore, delete, or copy those versions (this feature is available only in the Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista).

how does one get ahold of the beta builds? i'm interested in seeing how it'll run.

[neoterran]

We ran Vista Beta 2 on my brothers Athlon 64 3700+ and it was sluggish.  Workable but sluggish.  Not a good gaming platform for instance.  I'm hoping that the final version of Vista is the pinnacle of Windows performance...because it'd be nice...and its possible.

I'm pleased to see OpenGL continue to be supported completely.  I don't care much if I need an ICD for it to work or not because if you're doing anything with OpenGL you've probably already got any one of those now hundreds of models of video cards from ATI or nVidia that already ship with OpenGL ICD's in driver packages.  This is a big thumbs up...also good because many game designers get to keep that solid possibility of crossing over toh MacOS or Linux or anything else they want that uses OpenGL.  This is good!

I'll be taking a very long wait and see approach with Vista.  Its got to be just as efficient as WinXP and with better features, more stability, and more security or I'll have a hard time switching.  I noticed with WinXP that the same computer ran WinXP better than Win98 and that made me happy. I'll be hoping for much the same with Vista.  If not...I'll wait a while.

Beta 2 is really old. build 5381... it was very slow and it wasn't even finished. Check out RC1 in a few weeks you'll be surprised at how much different it is.

[neoterran]

I should point out that the latest builds (5506 +) are running very well indeed

Vista doesn't look much different really, but it has so many useful improvements technically, that it really is going to be a big improvement for windows users in many different ways. Just go look at the  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista

This feature alone is worth it, IMO :

Previous Versions automatically creates a backup copies of files and folders, with daily frequency. When the user right-clicks on a folder and selects "Restore previous versions", it shows multiple versions of a file throughout a limited history and allows the user to restore, delete, or copy those versions (this feature is available only in the Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista).

how does one get ahold of the beta builds? i'm interested in seeing how it'll run.

If you are a TechNet Subscriber, A MSDN subscriber, or if you are part of the TAP (Technology Adoption Program) 

or you can wait for RC1 (build 5520 or higher) that will be released sometime the first week of September to the general public. 

[Taristin]

If you are a TechNet Subscriber, A MSDN subscriber, or if you are part of the TAP (Technology Adoption Program) 

Explain more.....?

[Kazan]

while my specs were sarcastic exaggeration, those minimums are a JOKE - microsoft CPU wasting dictates higher requirements than that

[pecenipicek]

considering that a full fledged XP pro install, SP1, ran on a pentium 166, i have my doubt about that.



a properly optimised Vista with some major tweaks and removal of much of the more "impressive" stuff could be run on such a PC.


of course, there's the fact that it'd be slow as hell either way, but its very much possible.

hell, if a guy managed to slim win98 down to a floppy, and i saw XP installs slimmed down to... 200 megabytes or less, i think that vista is going to be slimmable like that too.


stability issues not included

[Ferret]

hell, if a guy managed to slim win98 down to a floppy, and i saw XP installs slimmed down to... 200 megabytes or less, i think that vista is going to be slimmable like that too.

The XP Lite CD I made is 135 MB.

[IceFire]

while my specs were sarcastic exaggeration, those minimums are a JOKE - microsoft CPU wasting dictates higher requirements than that

The minimums will probably work fine...but the usual tweaking of software is required to get it to do so.  It probably should do that out of the box but it doesn't.  That said...any distro of Linux I've worked with so far required at least some tweaking to get it up and running nicely (and I don't even know what I'm doing there really ) so its not entirely unexpected from a OS.  I think only MacOS seemed to play nice out of the box...and Apple controls the hardware so its harder to screw it up there.

One of the sys admins at my workplace has a comit charge and PF use teetering around 95mb on a WinXP Pro box.  He's got nearly every useless service turned off.  I'm not that good and my joystick management stuff takes up a fair bit....but I'm sure Vista can be tweaked to run on that hardware in a decent manner.  As neo points out with the various releases...we'll see how it comes along.  Hard to pass final judgement now.  It does seem like a bit of a bloat machine.  It depends on if the boat moves in a calming and soothing manner.

MacOS eats quite a few resources too...but its sold base and good hardware seem to make it run pretty well in my experience.  Smoothly .  I'm hoping the same from Vista.  Crossing my fingers...never know.  OR...it'll suck

[Fury]

Meh, proper OpenGL support is nothing new. This has been known ever since it was announced 3rd party graphics APIs will be supported through ICD's.