well my sister got a vista costomer prewiew, and i have to say its nic.... gut it lakt påengl 1.5 suport, witch sux... so bloom does not work... end so on...

As i understand it the graphic card manufacturers have to add opengl in their drivers and ATI, Nvidia already have done so. Maybe the computer does not have prober drivers installed but just some windows default drivers.
I still think compiz is cooler then vista and its already available and even for free.

Hopefully those are nice videos, i just searched for 'compiz video' on google
http://www.freedesktop.org/~davidr/xgl-demo1.xvid.avi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CgqWlX_GsI

yhaa... o know about compiz ( now beryl) but this is my systers computer... and i hope that i get it wen she gets a new one... so i can install linux (ubuntu witch i have been usin for 7 mounths...)

LOL

esteel wrote:As i understand it the graphic card manufacturers have to add opengl in their drivers and ATI, Nvidia already have done so. Maybe the computer does not have prober drivers installed but just some windows default drivers.

Yes, I am sure that is it. That's a problem even with XP, as I'm sure you know how often I have to tell people to get the manufacturers drivers to get games working

Irritant: Oh yes i have noticed that, i'm just puzzled that it happens that often for you.. But maybe you just notice it more often then the other games because of the auto joining irc client in the Alienarena launcher. Would be interesting to know if other games loose players that have no clue about graphic drivers.

Other question - how much DOES work with Vista's OpenGL wrapper?

Is it actually playable?

If it is good enough for low quality, it might actually be GOOD - since some onboard chipsets (notebooks!) don't have OpenGL drivers for XP.

+10^the number of atoms in the known universe.

It's rubbish and all of the mainstream computer 'enthusiasts' (read: pawns to the industry) will buy it, a whole new computer and a whole load of games to play on it too.

I'm running Beryl now under Sabayon. It's very good but still a bit beta. Sometimes things get a bit messed up and games run a bit slower but I think those sort of problems will be fixed soon. In the meantime I just drop back to KWin for gaming.

A saw something recently saying something like 22% of Windows users are tempted to go for Linux instead of Vista and for those people their are a number of really good distros with AIGLX. Mandriva seems back on form with 2007 which from what I've read is amazing. Think I'll stick with Sabayon though as I'm rather liking the way it's Gentoo based but isn't Gentoo.

I think that 22% statistic came from Digg.

No, the Vista OpenGL layer is not playable, I think it uses OpenGL v1.1. It is similar to playing with the Mesa OpenGL drivers.

ATI wrote:Note: The following ATI features are not supported in the Catalyst® Vista RTM driver for the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system:
· CrossFire™
· Catalyst® Control Center Video aspect page
· OpenGL
· VIVO support
· The capture driver for these products is not being updated at this time

Nvidia's Vista driver is supposed to contain OpenGL...

so finally, even on Vista ATI starts to suck...

divVerent wrote:so finally, even on Vista ATI starts to suck...

And some people already hoped the situation might improve after AMD bought them.. well this can be good for Nvidia as long as companies keep releasing good opengl games

So anyone with an ATi card (and probably every other card except an NVIDIA) can forget being able to play Nexuiz on Vista? That also means no Doom 3, Fear or Prey.

Ed wrote:So anyone with an ATi card (and probably every other card except an NVIDIA) can forget being able to play Nexuiz on Vista? That also means no Doom 3, Fear or Prey.

Yes thats right.. also no glquake, quake2, quake3, quake4, jediknight, gltron, (battlefield???), quite a few professional CAD programs, i guess some modeling programs. Its still time for ATI to release drivers with opengl but given how crappy they are under linux and that those drivers should LONG be in testing, i doubt they will have opengl at all. Its a shame that this will also reflect badly on AMD.
Well ofcourse an other thing is if there are enough people caring for this and thus try to avoid either ATI or Vista to make anyone reconsider. Or if those guys just go for the shiny new DX10 games that do not look different but lock them into vista..

Gego wrote:well my sister got a vista costomer prewiew, and i have to say its nic.... gut it lakt påengl 1.5 suport, witch sux... so bloom does not work... end so on...

Are you saying bloom does not work? If so that is not related to OpenGL version but to bugs in the Vista OpenGL emulator.

In Nexuiz the bloom only needs OpenGL 1.1 to work properly.
Stencil shadows only need OpenGL 1.1.
Bad per pixel lighting only needs OpenGL 1.1.
Bumpmapping needs OpenGL 1.4.
Good per pixel lighting needs OpenGL 2.0.

esteel wrote:Well ofcourse an other thing is if there are enough people caring for this and thus try to avoid either ATI or Vista to make anyone reconsider. Or if those guys just go for the shiny new DX10 games that do not look different but lock them into vista..

This all depends on when ATI releases Vista drivers, they're probably just holding off on releasing LDDM (Longhorn Display Driver Model, I believe) drivers until Vista is nearing the end of the beta phase.

LDDM drivers fully accelerate both OpenGL 2.0 and DirectX 9/10 and have fast switching between them, allowing all Vista Professional features (such as Aeroglass) to work properly.

Vista also supports Windows XP display drivers which disable Aeroglass whenever an OpenGL app is on the screen - Aeroglass is Direct3D based and the switching times between OpenGL and Direct3D rendering in Windows XP drivers is quite noticable, hence Aeroglass is disabled in this case to avoid freezing constantly.

I would imagine that existing ATI Windows XP drivers which support OpenGL 2.0 would work with Vista, just without Aeroglass when an OpenGL app is on the screen.

As icculus noted when he was interviewed by the FLOSS show (episode FLOSS08), Microsoft has improved the out-of-the-box OpenGL driver in Windows Vista - previous Windows versions had only software OpenGL out of the box, this OpenGL 1.5 Direct3D translation library is an improvement over software OpenGL 1.1, it is much faster (being hardware accelerated) and has more extensions.

This is an improvement not a step backward.

However I'm told that Vista is crashing every 2 hours during Microsoft presentations about it, and it has now gone gold, so OpenGL performance may not be the primary concern of Vista users

It is however sad that Microsoft chose not to make their Direct3D translator emulate OpenGL 2.0, it would be nice to have shaders on all Vista machines even if they have video cards with notoriously bad OpenGL drivers.

LordHavoc wrote:This all depends on when ATI releases Vista drivers, they're probably just holding off on releasing LDDM (Longhorn Display Driver Model, I believe) drivers until Vista is nearing the end of the beta phase.
...
I would imagine that existing ATI Windows XP drivers which support OpenGL 2.0 would work with Vista, just without Aeroglass when an OpenGL app is on the screen.

Well Vista is already RTMd (released to manufacturing) so ATI should hurry with releasing full blown drivers. But as i said in my other post i see no good reason not to release them early. Right now it will turn off people looking for OpenGL and it would also give them more testing if those drivers were already available.
Its still almost 2 months till Vista is fully available for everyone so there is still hope that Ati will improve the situation. Ignoring the fact that i do not care for windows as linux runs fine and has everything i need, i would make sure to get a NVidia card when i get a new one just to make sure

Gego wrote:well my sister got a vista costomer prewiew, and i have to say its nic.... gut it lakt påengl 1.5 suport, witch sux... so bloom does not work... end so on...

If a customer preview is one of the beta builds , of course its going to run UTTER CRAP
ALL Windows BETAs are that , UN OPTMISED BETA SOFTWARE not meant for Retail desktop useage .

Openg is getting worse every time their is a new verison of Windows , Opengl performance is great in Windows 2000 pro , slower in Win XP , ULTRA poor in Vista

From what Ive read Microsoft droped the native opengl support in Vista and now emulates it via direct x ( CRAPO)

If you want some pretty bling graphics , get the latest free stable Linux distros . The flip in Linux kicks arse .

Instead of using Vista , stay with Windows XP , otherwise try out Windows 2k pro or Windows 2003 . Also I recommend DONT run a default verison of Windows . Use nlite to remove the windows bloat .

Microsoft havent fixed XP , sp3 is a while away and their pushing new wanky un optimised vista already and ppl will be gauble enough to get it since they are pushing the same false promises as the last os that came out

Charliebrownau wrote:From what Ive read Microsoft droped the native opengl support in Vista and now emulates it via direct x ( CRAPO)

I already stated that is OPTIONAL, it is replaced by vendor OpenGL drivers for Vista with real native OpenGL, Vista changed how the drivers operate and some vendors have not released updated drivers yet, but I believe NVIDIA has. (NVIDIA's hardware basically speaks OpenGL, they'd be silly not to support it directly, since they have to translate Direct3D to their hardware)

Charliebrownau wrote:If you want some pretty bling graphics , get the latest free stable Linux distros . The flip in Linux kicks arse .

Only with an NVIDIA card, the ATI Linux drivers are really slow, and the Intel drivers are fine as far as I know but the hardware is slow

Charliebrownau wrote:Instead of using Vista , stay with Windows XP , otherwise try out Windows 2k pro or Windows 2003 . Also I recommend DONT run a default verison of Windows . Use nlite to remove the windows bloat .

Microsoft havent fixed XP , sp3 is a while away and their pushing new wanky un optimised vista already and ppl will be gauble enough to get it since they are pushing the same false promises as the last os that came out

Umm... MS bashing is fun and all, but spreading false information is a bad idea.

MS is going to stop supporting win2k and winxp sooner or later and there's really nothing that can be done about that except boycott Vista campaigns and all that fun stuff.

I completely agree with your sentiment of switching to Linux rather than 'upgrading' to Vista, I'm not entirely sure it is feasible for most gamers however.

There are three things needed for such a transition to occur:

• Yelling at publishers to support Linux - often the publishers resist Linux support more than the developers do, making claims of 'tech support costs' and other non-sense. (For reasons why this argument does not make sense, consider that the income scales with the number of customers, the tech support for each OS costs also scale with the number of customers on that OS)
• boycotting Vista - which leads to uncertainty in the Windows game market.
• buying Linux games - which leads to certainty in the Linux game market.