Vista RC2 Released

marc2003 · 11 Oct 2006 at 13:52

Scoobie Dave said:
Going slightly off topic . . . Apart from increase in sound quality (supposidly) does anyone notice a difference with actual game performace when using a sound card, like the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi? As the sound card takes away the processing that the cpu normally has to do in games (that much I understand). Can anyone back this up, is there much difference?

forget it. with vista there is no hardware accelerated sound except openal. kiss bye bye to eax. as we all know there are hardly any games with openal support whereas there are hundreds if not thousands which use eax. this isn't down to creative but rather how microsoft have redesigned the audio stack. nice one..... :rolleyes:

csmager first mentioned it earlier in the thread with this link.....

http://www.openal.org/openal_vista.html

so you have an audigy/xfi and want to use vista? well you're stuck using software emulated sound like anyone else with a $2 sound card......

i don't expect game developers will be falling over themselves to provide openal support for all current/recent games.

csmager · 11 Oct 2006 at 14:00

marc2003 said:
i don't expect game developers will be falling over themselves to provide openal support for all current/recent games.

But they will for all future games, so it's not complete doom and gloom(!) Suppose you could keep dual booting with XP for EAX games.

Cob · 11 Oct 2006 at 14:32

For the life of me I can't get Aero to work with the nVidia RC1 driver, even with the reg edit. It works fine with the built-in driver, but reverts to basic as soon as the nvidia driver is used :confused:

Scoobie Dave · 11 Oct 2006 at 14:39

csmager said:
But they will for all future games, so it's not complete doom and gloom(!) Suppose you could keep dual booting with XP for EAX games.

Oh well, I guess I will just use what I have as I cant be bothered to keep dual booting all the time just to play games, will be no point in having Vista if im in XP all the time just for the sound support. The onboard sound on my motherboard ain't that bad to justify the pain the a**e that I will have when Vista's released.

The Running Man · 11 Oct 2006 at 15:03

thing is with that no soundcard will have the support, so theres no point binning your creative for another brand because the underlying issue will remain.

Echo toxin · 11 Oct 2006 at 15:48

I doubt I'll bother with an add-in sound card again now as I'm not a musician so don't need any fancy stuff. With all this dual/quad-core stuff on the horizon, the sound can easily be managed on one of the cores.

Scoobie Dave · 11 Oct 2006 at 15:58

Does anyone know if SLI is supported in RC2?

The Running Man · 11 Oct 2006 at 16:31

- okay so im going to try and install RC2 tonight.

does it have the HDD pre format stuff to format NTFS a brand new sata drive off the bat? (F8 full, create partition etc etc...)

do i need floppy/drivers for SATA current running a sata hdd, but i have set the mobo up to pretend IDE for SATA...

if i install with it set as SATA1, and then change to SATA2 will my install be okay?

thanks

(should i pre format my new sata hdd inside my current win xp installation through my computer or go for all fresh?)

Scoobie Dave · 11 Oct 2006 at 16:41

Nickg said:
- okay so im going to try and install RC2 tonight.

Me too, when I get home from work . . .

Gaverick · 11 Oct 2006 at 17:48

Anybody else get windows live messenger crashing frequently in RC2, it froze sometimes in XP but in Vista it's really bad

~J~ · 11 Oct 2006 at 18:20

Gonna install myself this evening, but three critical questions for me are:

Has anyone had any issues of running VStudio2005 on Vista? ( I know there ARE issues, but has any encounted any).
Likewise, has anyone developed something in VS2005 on Vista and released it to a XP end user?
Is daemon tools or similar working yet?

Gaverick · 11 Oct 2006 at 18:33

i can't say about vstudio 2005 but daemon tools works for me fine

pinkegobox · 11 Oct 2006 at 18:40

~J~ said:
Has anyone had any issues of running VStudio2005 on Vista? ( I know there ARE issues, but has any encounted any).

Likewise, has anyone developed something in VS2005 on Vista and released it to a XP end user?

my mate has being doing vs2005 dev. on vista for a few weeks now... and he's not had any problems, at least no biggies (he would have mentioned them to me if he had!)

i've just installed studio on my rc2 install, but not used it yet so can't give you first hand experience am afraid. installed ok, but did say sql wouldn't work until you download sql2005-sp2. which i've not actually done yet, as i don't need it atm.

edit: and i installed it with deamon tools! new release on their site lists vista support as a new feature, so i assume it didn't work before.

~J~ · 11 Oct 2006 at 18:52

Brilliant, cheers for the responses folks.

pinkegobox: I've heard that about SQL, but I've got SQL2000 here as an installation (will need to install it as a server under Vista), you had any issues with that?

Una · 11 Oct 2006 at 18:53

~J~ said:
Gonna install myself this evening, but three critical questions for me are:

Has anyone had any issues of running VStudio2005 on Vista? ( I know there ARE issues, but has any encounted any).

Likewise, has anyone developed something in VS2005 on Vista and released it to a XP end user?

Is daemon tools or similar working yet?

[*]Has anyone had any issues of running VStudio2005 on Vista? ( I know there ARE issues, but has any encounted any).

VS2005 C++ Express Edition worked fine in rc1 not tried rc2 yet.

[*]Likewise, has anyone developed something in VS2005 on Vista and released it to a XP end user?

Depends on what it is your writing - obviously the binary is still x86-32 or x86-64. Obviously if your using any of the new vista libraries its not going to work either.

Scoobie Dave · 11 Oct 2006 at 18:55

Gaverick said:
Anybody else get windows live messenger crashing frequently in RC2, it froze sometimes in XP but in Vista it's really bad

Cant say I have had much of a problem yet with anything. RC2 seems a nice improvement over RC1.

Definately faster.

bungler · 11 Oct 2006 at 19:24

Cob said:
For the life of me I can't get Aero to work with the nVidia RC1 driver, even with the reg edit. It works fine with the built-in driver, but reverts to basic as soon as the nvidia driver is used

I spent a while trying to get it to work and then I realised the provided drivers (96.77) are newer than the RC1 drivers (96.33) anyway. You don't get the control panel but that wasn't very good anyway.

Gaverick · 11 Oct 2006 at 19:28

everything works perfect for me except msn, what an irony

NathanE · 11 Oct 2006 at 19:29

Hardware accelerated audio is still possible on Vista (simply by bypassing the Vista audio stack completely and talking to a bespoke kernel driver to do the job) it just requires sound card drivers to be rewritten to do this and/or games to support it.

OpenAL is one such library that bypasses the Vista audio stack. So future games simply must rely on a third party library now to do 3D hardware accelerated audio rather than on DirectSound.

OpenAL said:
The good news for owners of advanced audio cards like SoundBlaster X-Fi is that the developer community has been preparing for this for over 3 years. Hardware audio will not be disappearing with the launch of Windows Vista. Games that support OpenAL today will continue to provide full hardware-enhanced 3D audio under Windows Vista. This includes games such as Battlefield 2, Doom3, Unreal Tournament2k4, Dungeon and Dragons Online, Prey, Quake 4, and many others (a full list can be found at http://www.openal.org/titles.html). These games have complete hardware-based HRTF support for multiple speaker and headphone setups as well as full support for all the different versions of EAX. Also, these games will be able to take advantage of the hardware-accelerated path on supporting hardware for performance and quality increases.

The reason Microsoft did this is 3 fold:

1. Reduces complexity of standard sound components in the kernel - allowing 90% of audio code to execute in user mode. Therefore increased reliability.

2. Allows the standard audio stack to focus on hi-fidelity stereo output, rather than trying to be a jack-of-all-trades like the one in XP.

3. Ultimately improves gaming experience because audio capabilities are not limited by the Windows release cycle. Simply upgrade your OpenAL driver or whatever and enjoy upgraded sound...

Bonus. Use of XP's standard audio stack for the purpose of 3D sound has been in decline for many years. Almost all current game engines don't use it. Doom 3 engine has its own 3D audio engine, and Unreal, BF2 etc engines use OpenAL already anyway.

kidloco · 11 Oct 2006 at 19:34

anyone on the one Care Live beta as well, i thought id give it a whirl, did have AVAST on there but I was bored so i changed it for this. seems pretty good so far. just hope the anti virus is powerfull enough