Microsoft Vista, OpenGL and 12d Model

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Alan Gray
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Joined: Fri Sep 30, 2005 4:25 pm

Microsoft Vista, OpenGL and 12d Model

Post by Alan Gray »

Warning.

Microsoft Vista ships with a generic OpenGL driver that impliments only a 1.1 driver. This means almost all software packages using OpenGL will NOT run on Vista.

At the time of writing, only NVidia and ATI seem to have half decent drivers available for Vista. Even the Company Intel are only supplying an OpenGL driver supporting the 1.4 standard (and 1.4 was released in July 2002). The Intel drivers are NOT up to standard and hence 12d does not work. So for any computer that has an Intel Express 945 chip set, please direct your compaints to Intel. Intel's driver for the same chip set on Windows XP works fine.

So if you are going to run Vista in the near future, it is possible that only graphic cards from NVidia and ATI (now owned by AMD) have a decent chance of working. We have tested the drivers from both companies and they have worked in the the majority of tests on the cards we have available to us. There are strange corners in Vista in that if you Alt-Tab to a different window whilst driving down a road, Vista will kill the drive.

Given Vista's heavy requirements on good graphics cards, any card with less than 256 meg of memory is not going to work to any acceptable level.

This really means you should only be installing Vista on brand new computers with either NVidia or ATI graphics cards that state OpenGL 2.0 support, with at least 256 meg of memory, and it is an OpenGL ICD (installable client driver).


For NVidia

http://www.nvidia.com/page/technology_vista_main.html

For ATI

http://ati.amd.com/technology/windowsvista/index.html

Please note that some graphics cards only support DirectX. Before purchasing a graphics card, look at the vendor's web page for that product to make sure it states ICD OpenGL 2.0 support for Vista. I would go as far as printing or saving the web page (just incase).

For information on Microsoft's TDR (Timeout Detection & Recovery)

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/di ... meout.mspx

Also of interest

http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_7/
http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_9/
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