DirectX 10

The problems with Nvidia cards and Vista has nothing to do with Vista being bugged or needing a service pack. Its everything to do with the fact that Nvidia couldn't be bothered to bring a decent driver out in time for release. If you have an ATI card you will find that Vista is as fast if not faster than XP at everything. Once Nvidia get their finger out of their rear end then it will be for Nvidia users too.

Just thought I'd clear that up :p again :rolleyes: :D

PS I am not a 'fanboy' or anything like that before anyone starts... I am using a 7800GT on XP!
 
Aren't the ATI drivers for Vista nearly as screwed? The ones that ship with Vista aren't bad for DirectX but no OGL support - the downloadable ones seem to cause loads of instability for a lot of people.

The thing you think you're clearing up is actually two seperate issues:

1) There is a (correct!) preconcieved notion that Vista is buggy and bloaty. This is true - memory useage sky rockets...HDD useage (1.5GB of printer drivers?!). Let alone the fact that any new OS release is *bound* to have various bugs. XP is stable now - how many years after release? It wasn't until SP2 that it really started to become a 'good' operating system.

2) Games performance due to drivers. Lots of games don't work or run at nearly 50% speed in Vista (Nvidia). I couldn't say /re ATI as I've not seen one running in Vista. However, from reports I've heard, they're not in quite as bad a boat as Nvidia but they're still not all there. Now, why would go the Vista route when many games don't work or are slow? Remember, this is the PC Games section of the OCUK forum.

(Also, just looked at guru3d and it seems the Vista perf/compat is almost or just as bad for ATI...woo)
 
Right, lets deal with these one by one :

I run vista 64 on 2 pc's, one with an x1800xt and the other with a 7600gs. The ATI drivers are so much better than the nvidia ones it's unreal, both from a stability and performance point of view. They also have open GL support since the last driver release (31/1).

HDD use and memory use in Vista are the result of a thing called Prefetch. Vista knows what apps you use on a regular basis, so when it loads it immediately starts pre loading your most used apps into memory. This is why the hard disk knackers itself when the o/s starts and why your memory usage looks so high.

You're right in that most of the issues people experience are due to unready graphics drivers. I've noticed maybe a few fps drop on some games, no noticable performance difference on others WITH THE ATI DRIVERS. The nvidia ones are just rubbish :p

The only really serious thing I've found wrong with Vista so far is the lack of directsound support, which is just shocking considering how many games use it. Don't expect your surround sound to work for a lot of games :mad:
 
Things aren't great but its not all that bad either.

I clearly remember when XP came out, it had all the same problems + much much more. Bugs, crashed, no drivers, bloat etc. Dodgy drivers from Nivida and Creative (no suprise), and it took em a long time to sort it out. I remember a lot of people talking about sticking to 98.

A year or so into XP I reinstalled 98 to play some games in stereo 3D (no drivers for XP at the time, sound familier?). I found that games performance was far better in the new OS. That hadn't been the case a year previously.

Now while I'm not condoning poor software on release, I can see the light at the end of the tunnell. Todays XP is much more mature than it was originally, and i think Vista will become a very solid OS over a fairly short time.

All in all, the move to Vista was a lot less painfull for me than the move from 98 to XP.

In the end tho, I wish they would slow down their OS developement - we really don't need a new OS every 5 years. We just need one good one that will do us for a lot longer.
 
Vista will get up to speed much quicker than XP did. When XP came out the vast majority of hardware manufacturers were used to writing 16-bit VXD drivers for Windows 98/ME. When Microsoft finally forced the push onto the 32-bit NT operating system (XP) they basically had to relearn how to write device drivers from scratch. Now although Vista does have some very new programming interfaces (like the new display and audio driver models) it's not the "sea change" like it was between 9x and XP.

You can bet 90% of the work ATI and Nvidia are doing right now is pressing CTRL+C and CTRL+V. Perhaps less so (~35%?) for folks like Creative because they're having to get to grips with the user-mode Windows Driver Framework (UMWDF) which is now mandatory for sound card drivers.
 
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Seems a few people (the nay sayers) in this thread are living under a rock. Have a look at the other threads.

This is still a new OS and while there's a learning curve it's generally still pretty good.

You have to consider people having game issues are mainly using geforce cards, which is entirely nvidias fault. The rest of the issues are down to dropped support for 16 bit, copy protection that's not supported under vista, people not trying running them under admin credentials and just a plain lack of support.

If you want to play games niggle free then don't buy a new OS.
 
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Struggling to get back to the topic from faffing around with device drivers and vista stability issues.

Are there any DX10 gameplay demos ? If not what will be the first one to come along ?
 
dbmzk1 said:
The problems with Nvidia cards and Vista has nothing to do with Vista being bugged or needing a service pack. Its everything to do with the fact that Nvidia couldn't be bothered to bring a decent driver out in time for release. If you have an ATI card you will find that Vista is as fast if not faster than XP at everything. Once Nvidia get their finger out of their rear end then it will be for Nvidia users too.

Just thought I'd clear that up :p again :rolleyes: :D

PS I am not a 'fanboy' or anything like that before anyone starts... I am using a 7800GT on XP!
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This is not true. Up until yesterday, I had Vista 64 a week before launch, using an X1950XT. The drivers (official WHQL certified ones too!) would crash, or BSOD half the time when you open a game up, or alt-tab. Reliability was out the window. I would try repeatedly to open WoW or Fear or HL2, and it would crash or go to desktop with 'R300 driver stopped responding but recovered successfully'.

Bought an 8800GTS yesterday, installed the Vista 64 drivers off Nvidia's website and guess what, not a problem in sight. No crashes, or glitches. Isn't it funny how Nvidia's beta drivers are far better than ATi's official ones eh.
 
KNiVES said:
Isn't it funny how Nvidia's beta drivers are far better than ATi's official ones eh.
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Perhaps in this instance. Generaly I would say ATI users are having more success though. My x1900 xt works flawlessly.

It doesn't matter what's said, the issues lie with the drivers not the OS, Nvidia are dragging their knuckles.

edit: I do seem to be noticing a trend of x1950 users having problems.
 
Pablo72 said:
The old mantra of never buy a version of Windows until Service Pack 1 is released is always a good one to follow, and has never let me down yet!

Well.. in the case of XP it was Service Pack 2!!!!!
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agree completely lol think it will be sp2 for vista as well for me lol
 
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