Author Topic: Vista be killin' my Freespace  (Read 11403 times)

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Vista be killin' my Freespace
Not sure if anyone else using Vista is running into this, but my new rig with Vista doesn't seem to like running SCP very much.  I was getting higher framerates with my old laptop that had a mobility X600 and a gig of RAM than my current desktop with an 8800GTS and 2 gigs of RAM.

I'm assuming this is due to Vista excruciatingly poor OpenGL support.  Just an FYI to any upgraders, don't expect SCP to run very well until there's some better video card drivers out there.  And be assured that I've installed and set up everything correctly. 

 

Offline CP5670

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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
It has more to do with the 8800 Vista drivers than Vista itself. The current ones are known to have a ton of problems.

 

Offline neoterran

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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
Not sure if anyone else using Vista is running into this, but my new rig with Vista doesn't seem to like running SCP very much.  I was getting higher framerates with my old laptop that had a mobility X600 and a gig of RAM than my current desktop with an 8800GTS and 2 gigs of RAM.

I'm assuming this is due to Vista excruciatingly poor OpenGL support.  Just an FYI to any upgraders, don't expect SCP to run very well until there's some better video card drivers out there.  And be assured that I've installed and set up everything correctly. 

I surely hope you realise that the graphics card driver providers are to blame, not vista.

It's a brand new operating system with a new driver model and the drivers had to be rewritten.

You also have brand new hardware and it's known to have very immature drivers (they only just came out !) to support it. Give it time.

I use vista and an older graphics card and i'm not having any speed issues. I'm not a person overly conerned about frame-rates tho.
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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
Well first off, I'm certainly not complaining (I knew both Vista AND my Video card are brand-new and hardly polished).

I guess I was just assuming it was due to Vista's poor OpenGL implementation.  It's at least as well known that OpenGl games are performing hideously across the board on Vista regardless of graphic card.

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2917&p=19

If no one else is having issues though, I guess I'll just wait for better 8800 drivers to come out, no biggie.  Also, I'm not really concerned about framerates or bragging rights either, the drop from 50 FPS during big battles to 25 is quite noticeable even without the counter, however. 

 

Offline neoterran

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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
I guess I was just assuming it was due to Vista's poor OpenGL implementation.   

Quote from: Anandtech link=http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2917&p=19
Moving on to OpenGL and Quake 4, we'll be able to see how well NVIDIA and AMD have done in building their own OpenGL ICD

Again, you're automatically blaming Vista without understanding of how the technology works. For discrete graphics cards like yours and mine, OpenGL is provided as an ICD in the driver you download. How good that implementation is, is due to the graphics card vendor, not due to microsoft. There should be no difference in a perfect world between OpenGL performance on XP and in Vista. Additionally complicating the matter is the fact that the 8800 is a brand new design that differs in hardware significantly from the 6 and 7 series cards, which are similar to each other.

My Geforce 5600 FX ultra can only use the 97.xx series vista driver and doesn't even work anymore in the 100.xx series and up. the 8800 ONLY uses the 100.xx series and up, but I can tell you that FS SCP works for me the same in Vista as in XP.

For you however, the situation is more unclear. the 8800 only just got support for vista like a week or two ago. DirectX performance is similarly terrible across the board on this card, which is also due to the drivers. In fact, you may be already aware that there is a class action lawsuit pending against nvidia for this and that nvidia has revamped their release schedule to monthly as a response.
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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
I think you might be misunderstanding me, my friend.  I'm blaming Microsoft for poor performance RIGHT NOW because writing an OpenGL ICD is currently much harder than writing a Direct3D one for Vista.

Quote
Moving on to OpenGL and Quake 4, we'll be able to see how well NVIDIA and AMD have done in building their own OpenGL ICD (installable client driver) for the API. This is more taxing on hardware vendors, because Microsoft's implementation of OpenGL is just a wrapper around DirectX. By default, unless an ICD is used, OpenGL applications cannot talk directly to the hardware.

Quote
GPU limited performance does seem to improve over CPU limited performance, indicating that driver overhead on the CPU is a major factor contributing to the reduced frame rates.

OpenGL games are running signifigantly worse on Vista than XP.  It's partially an issue for me because there aren't any terribly good drivers for the 8800GTS on EITHER system, but for whatever reason Vista likes working with Direct3D a lot more than OpenGL (even more so in Vista than XP).  Since Direct3D IS Microsoft, I hardly think it's a coincidence things got a lot worse in that regard with the new OS.  If you're getting the same framerates in XP and Vista then that's great, however your video card is old enough that it is unfortunately kind of in the same camp as the X1300 and X1650 camp in this article, i.e. they are such poor performers regardless at this point that the loss of efficiency in Vista isn't really noticeable. 

 

Offline neoterran

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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
I think you might be misunderstanding me, my friend.  I'm blaming Microsoft for poor performance RIGHT NOW because writing an OpenGL ICD is currently much harder than writing a Direct3D one for Vista.

Quote
Moving on to OpenGL and Quake 4, we'll be able to see how well NVIDIA and AMD have done in building their own OpenGL ICD (installable client driver) for the API. This is more taxing on hardware vendors, because Microsoft's implementation of OpenGL is just a wrapper around DirectX. By default, unless an ICD is used, OpenGL applications cannot talk directly to the hardware.

Quote
GPU limited performance does seem to improve over CPU limited performance, indicating that driver overhead on the CPU is a major factor contributing to the reduced frame rates.

OpenGL games are running signifigantly worse on Vista than XP.  It's partially an issue for me because there aren't any terribly good drivers for the 8800GTS on EITHER system, but for whatever reason Vista likes working with Direct3D a lot more than OpenGL (even more so in Vista than XP).  Since Direct3D IS Microsoft, I hardly think it's a coincidence things got a lot worse in that regard with the new OS.  If you're getting the same framerates in XP and Vista then that's great, however your video card is old enough that it is unfortunately kind of in the same camp as the X1300 and X1650 camp in this article, i.e. they are such poor performers regardless at this point that the loss of efficiency in Vista isn't really noticeable. 

Again, 90 percent of your problem is your graphics card and it's poor drivers. I have no issues with OpenGL use on my vista, i use it for games (not current ones obviously) and i use it for output with glass still on with VLC. Works fine, i haven't lost frames on these games vs XP. Also, ICD's are also required on XP.

If I were you, i'd go pay a visit to http://www.nvidiaclassaction.org/ instead of blaming microsoft.

Also, read this : http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070206-8784.html

I'll quote :
Quote

    I have Vista Ultimate 32-bit edition and an 8800GTX. I installed 4 games (UT2004, Dreamfall, Oblivion and NFS Most Wanted) and not a single one of them works. Even with Forceware 100.30, 100.54 and 100.59.

    If I am lucky I can play for a couple of seconds, but then the game crashes to the desktop with the error message "Your display driver crashed and has been recovered" ...or something.

Those are not OpenGL games (well UT2004 is) and they still have troubles. It's just a crap driver all around. I'm not a big fan of nvidia, they also dropped support for a bunch of hardware that is only just 4 years old. I mean, it's older hardware, but you expect a bit more support, especially for major operating system upgrades, at least provide a base level supported driver even if you no longer make improvements. It's really quite pathetic, but there are droves of mindless upgrade zombies who will shell out for the latest and greatest every 6 months, so i guess we only have ourselves to blame.
« Last Edit: February 11, 2007, 03:47:43 pm by neoterran »
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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
You aren't having issues with games performance on Vista because your video card is borderline obsolete and at this point a 20% reduction in efficiency (which appears to be the average amount shown on the more modern cards) isn't going to be noticeable.  I understand you are having no performance issues in Vista whatsoever.  That is great, really.  Most people are, because most people have better video cards than you.  It probably doesn't matter for you in specific regards to SCP because you're likely not running the advanced effects MVP. 

Also, I'm very aware XP requires an ICD too, DirectX was around way before XP came out.  The problem is that Vista doesn't even SEE OpenGL anymore, it just sees it as another layer to Direct3D.  XP didn't behave like that, it was much easier  to write an ICP for the hardware and game to talk directly.  Vendors are gonna figure out the issue eventually and most likely fix the performance woes, but until they do there are some serious Vista OpenGL issues specifically BECAUSE of the new way Vista treats OpenGL. 

Probably 70-80% of my problem is that in a tax rebate-fueled binge I bought a video card for my computer that frankly wasn't ready for release.  I understand this.  But Vista and OpenGL ain't working together properly, and I'm willing to bet there's some people out there whose Freespace is suffering as well because of that. 

edit:  also, thank you for the links.  I am aware of the site, although I think it's a little ridiculous to be threatening lawsuits to anyone at this point.  You buy something brand new like Vista, you should expect some things to not be perfect right out of the chute. 
« Last Edit: February 11, 2007, 03:50:00 pm by Agentbolt »

 

Offline neoterran

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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
yeah, well those people with 8800 cards anyway. lol

as for me not being able to see a 20 percent performance reduction, i call bull****. I'd definately notice this.

I'm willing to guarantee that 6 and 7 series owners won't have the difficulties you're experiencing. Have you even tried to run a 6800 and see if you have horrid performance ?
Quote
Also, I'm very aware XP requires an ICD too, DirectX was around way before XP came out.  The problem is that Vista doesn't even SEE OpenGL anymore, it just sees it as another layer to Direct3D.  XP didn't behave like that, it was much easier  to write an ICP for the hardware and game to talk directly.  Vendors are gonna figure out the issue eventually and most likely fix the performance woes, but until they do there are some serious Vista OpenGL issues specifically BECAUSE of the new way Vista treats OpenGL.

If you don't have an ICD on XP, you run in OpenGL Software rendered mode with no GPU hardware support, that just uses your CPU to do everything. That's hardly worhtwhile use, and it's something I doubt you've ever experienced.

And i'm sorry if this comes off wrong, but how do you know how "easy" writing an ICD is or isn't ? Are you a graphics developer ? If you are, i'm sure we can use you.... if not, then you probably heard it from Nvidia, who are trying to blame someone else for their problem in not planning correctly for a major (and late) SW upgrade. They knew they'd have to rewrite this stuff from at least 2003 onwards.

Again... if you have a problem, you really need to isolate why you have a problem. Vista is NOT the issue.

What do you want microsoft to do anyway ? Not give us a vastly improved interface ? Keep it the same as an obsolete Operating system from 1995 ? Seriously... they had to change it, and for whatever reason, Nvidia just didn't get it right for the 8800 series at launch.
« Last Edit: February 11, 2007, 03:55:48 pm by neoterran »
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Offline MP-Ryan

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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
Again... if you have a problem, you really need to isolate why you have a problem. Vista is NOT the issue.

What do you want microsoft to do anyway ? Not give us a vastly improved interface ? Keep it the same as an obsolete Operating system from 1995 ? Seriously... they had to change it, and for whatever reason, Nvidia just didn't get it right for the 8800 series at launch.

Whoa, hoss.

Yeah, ultimately the blame lies on the GPU manufacturers for not ensuring high quality driver releases... BUUUUUUT....

So far I've seen precious little that demonstrates Vista is anything more than a pretty GUI with DX10 support.  So far, we're seeing the same kinds of hardware compatibility issues that plagues XP's launch (which aren't unexpected mind you) and no real performance improvements.  Various "experts" have commented that Vista is really nothing special.

Microsoft is pushing another OS release for the sake of another OS release, not because there's any significant improvement in the software.  Vista, by all accounts, is an even bigger resource hog than XP.  And this push for DX10 is really ignoring the advances of OpenGL.  So yeah, while hardware manufacturers should be aware of the issues and work towards supporting their hardware in various modes, Microsoft is very much directing they way they want software to be written for their OS.  DX10 applications push people to move to Vista for both software and hardware support (though rumour has it that XP is going to get some sort of overhaul that allows DX10 support on it soon here too).

I'm not excusing anyone responsible here, it's simply that a combintion of factors involving both hardware and software are at play in the performance issues surrounding Vista.
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Offline neoterran

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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
Quote

Whoa, hoss.
So far I've seen precious little that demonstrates Vista is anything more than a pretty GUI with DX10 support.  So far, we're seeing the same kinds of hardware compatibility issues that plagues XP's launch (which aren't unexpected mind you) and no real performance improvements.  Various "experts" have commented that Vista is really nothing special.

Microsoft is pushing another OS release for the sake of another OS release, not because there's any significant improvement in the software. 

Okay, you've lost all your credibility right there. This is patently false, Except for the fact that Vista is slower than XP, it is by around 6 percent. But the performance tradeoff is worth the multiple fundamental usability improvements.

Have you even used Vista ? I've used the final for 3 months. In that time i have gotten 0 spyware. None. I used to get several a month on XP.

Security, Audio, Networking, Graphics, Usability, just about everything has recieved a major upgrade in Vista over XP. To just say it's XP with a pretty gui slapped on it is the height of ignorance.

Anyway, I'm leaving this thread because it's starting to turn into a flamewar. I leave it up to the readers to decide for themselves which side is correct when it comes to vista.

Is it going to be great on all hardware combinations out there ? Hell no. But it should be great on the latest and greatest, which the 8800 is... and it is just pathetic that Nvidia has failed the userbase in this manner... but what do they care ? the uninformed user just hates on microsoft and blames vista.
« Last Edit: February 11, 2007, 04:17:29 pm by neoterran »
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Offline Nuke

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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
my 8800gts gives me pretty good performance on xp so i can tell you for sure its not the card.
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Offline neoterran

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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
my 8800gts gives me pretty good performance on xp so i can tell you for sure its not the card.

it's the cards drivers. Unless you are unaware, the drivers are different between xp and vista... completely.
* neoterran sighs...
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Offline CaptJosh

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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
Hey neoterran, I'll hold 'em, You hit 'em.

Now, for the umpteenth time, drivers are SOFTWARE. Software != hardware. This is NOT a difficult concept. Don't make me get out my clue-by-four.
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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
I'm actually going to partially retract my rant.  I was researching and found this:

http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/6039/

I hadn't heard that.  I was under the impression that OpenGL had been layered, and it hasn't been.  If it had been, that'd have been the obvious cause of any OpenGL/Vista issues.  So I'm going to retract what I said earlier about it being monumentally tougher to code OpenGL for Windows because of how Vista is implemented, with an apology. 

However, Neoterran, OpenGL isn't working properly across the board, NOT just with the 8800GTS.  I think you need to re-read the Anandtech article. 

Quote
As expected, OpenGL performance is much worse both in CPU limited and GPU limited cases. The reason the low end AMD cards look better off here is that their performance is simply bad across the board. NVIDIA seems to perform closer to XP in general here, and both companies are saying that performance will improve over time. GPU limited performance does seem to improve over CPU limited performance, indicating that driver overhead on the CPU is a major factor contributing to the reduced frame rates.

That's what they said about OpenGL

Quote
First up is Oblivion performance. DirectX performance should be as close as possible to Windows XP performance as this is Microsoft's baby. First, let's take a look at Vista x86 numbers divided by Windows XP scores for CPU limited and GPU limited cases. This will give us the speed up (numbers above one) or slow down (numbers less than one) as compared to Windows XP. Just remember that there is some normal fluctuation in performance on both sides, so we could see a wider margin of error here than in our standard comparisons.

Quote
For CPU bound tests, almost every card performs better under Windows Vista than under Windows XP; the lone exception is the X1900 XT 256MB. This indicates that Vista is better able to provide system resources to DirectX games, which is actually quite surprising considering the overhead that Vista adds to the system.

That's Direct3D.  Direct3D is working, OpenGL is not.  For GPU bound benchmarks in Direct3D games were slower, granted, but the lowest was 93% of XP, compared to OpenGL which is only 70% as fast. 

This is BOTH ATI and NVidia, so you can't blame NVidia for this issue solely.  And if both companies were just "being lazy" with their Vista support, why is Direct3D working so well and OpenGL so poorly?  Your claims that NVidia is somehow completely at fault here, and that OpenGL games peform just as well under XP as they do in Vista, carries no water because every quantitative piece of evidence is indicating that is not the case. 


 

Offline CaptJosh

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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
It's not about laziness. It's about a new driver API. It's not going to be perfect the first time out. It isn't even necessarily going to be good on first run drivers. ESPECIALLY on new hardware architecture like that in the geforce 8 series cards.
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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
Again, then, I'm gonna have to ask why Direct3D is working so well, and OpenGL is working so poorly.  Common sense seems to dictate that OpenGL is tougher to code for than Direct3D under Vista.  OpenGL is not so dead for games that either company would've just ignored optimizing for it when making their drivers.

 

Offline neoterran

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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
Alright Agentbolt,

I appreciate the retraction, sometimes it gets very annoying with just the knee jerk reaction to blame microsoft for anything, or to say vista is nothing more than some old paint slapped onto xp. Vista has many issues, and it'll certainly be better after a service pack or two, but it is a marked improvement from xp, which, IMHO, sucked right up until SP2. Gold XP was buggy as hell, and some of those bugs still exist in xp today. remove the go button from explorer.exe and then resize the window wide and drop down the drop down addressbar and you'll see what i mean. vista's explorer.exe, while slower, is much less buggy.

Anyway.... vista could definately have done with a longer dev cycle. Vista was devloped in only 3 years, as almost everything up to 2004 got scrapped after MS realised it wasn't going to work. Alot of the work is done under the hood in changing and compartmentalizing the codebase, removing cyclical dependencies, et al.  I'm sure this work will continue with Windows 7, to be released in 2009.

As for the driver issues, well, look at those charts. The variance is not ranked by performance, indeed, a **** card, the x1300, performs the same under vista than under xp. It's varying wildly across chipsets and performance levels. That indicates to me, driver level issues.

So, i'll concede that Vista opengl drivers, depending on your card, might not be as good as on XP. But in my case (as in the x1300) I haven't noticed any slowdown. Since anandtech only bothered to test currently available cards, we don't have an idea of how drivers perform for older cards.

On the other hand, direct X cards are mostly better. slightly. But as you can see 8800 owners are still bitter with many games just not running. I think the graphics cards guys need to be fully responsible for this; it's part of charging 300 to 700 dollars for a piece of hardware manufactured for up to 130 dollars max in many cases. You owe the customer what you say on the box.

Keep in mind too, that the nvidia driver encompases almost 20 million lines of code. That is almost as much as NT 4.0 itself. It's not a trivial manner to deal with such a massive codebase for so many cards. This is why nvidia is starting to drop support. Their whole unified driver approach is beginning to come apart as well.

As for OpenGL vs DirectX, it's obvious to anyone that most games use DirectX. Becasue of that, it'll recieve more coding time and resources and be a bigger priority for the companies to get right.

« Last Edit: February 11, 2007, 04:56:13 pm by neoterran »
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Offline Nuke

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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
my 8800gts gives me pretty good performance on xp so i can tell you for sure its not the card.

it's the cards drivers. Unless you are unaware, the drivers are different between xp and vista... completely.
* neoterran sighs...

you think i dont know that, i was just elimenating hardware as a source of the problem.
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Offline MP-Ryan

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Re: Vista be killin' my Freespace
I appreciate the retraction, sometimes it gets very annoying with just the knee jerk reaction to blame microsoft for anything, or to say vista is nothing more than some old paint slapped onto xp. Vista has many issues, and it'll certainly be better after a service pack or two, but it is a marked improvement from xp, which, IMHO, sucked right up until SP2.

This is precisely what I was getting at in my post.

Oh, and the bit earlier about Vista and spyware is not a very good argument for the superiority of Vista.  First off, I've been on XP Pro since it's release.  In that time, I've had 2 viral infections on the PC (both of which due to some circumstances which were my doing, not the OS's) and no spyware.  None.  A properly configured and managed XP system is no more vulnerable than MacOS (Linux is another story) - but it'll take more work, because there's more out there to compromise it.  Saying Vista is superior because it doesn't get spyware is like saying Macs are immune to all malware.  It just ain't so.  The userbase was small enough that there wasn't the volume of exploits as for XP.  That'll change.

I'm not hating on Microsoft - I'm pointing out that poor performance is partially their fault.  Vista is a resource hog, and Microsoft is pushing DX10.  This all translates into reduced support for OpenGL-based applications.  Yes, nVidia and ATI could both push out support for DirectX and OpenGL, but why go to all the effort when all the hype concerns DX10?  It's a financial call too.

Undoubtably, the bugs will get worked out of Vista, and hardware manufacturers will get the hang of writing drivers for Vista intentionally.  But saying that the only reason OpenGL isn't having its full potential realized on Vista is because the hardware manufacturers are too lazy to code decent drivers is ignoring half the big picture.

Oh, and I haven't played with Vista on this machine yet - too lazy to download the beta when it was in testing, and I'm not forking out the cash to load a new OS on an ancient PC.  I've seen it in action and heard various things good and bad from a variety of people who know a great deal more about hardware than I do.  I'll get in bundled with a new PC when I've got the cash to spare.
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