So, I've heard OpenGL support on Vista is like, bad and stuff. People say however that once you download and install official drivers from the GPU supplier (in this case Nvidia) it should be perfectly fine. Well, I have done this, but Nexuiz performance is still sub-standard. Now, the following part is something people have mostly ignored for some reason when I've talked about this on IRC, which is annoying cause it's worth noting: Valve games (HL2 and CS:S specificly) work very, very well on close to highest settings. I know they are D3D driven games, so that helps a lot, but I'm just noting this, to make sure everyone understands that the system is *not* slow, that it is something else. It's not the fastest of systems, but still better than another computer which has XP installed, where Nexuiz runs fine.

I don't have access to the suffering computer in question, nor is it mine, so this info won't be super specific:

AMD 64 processor (speed unknown)
2gb ram
Geforce 7500 Lame Edition
Windows Vista 32bit
200gb HD

Using low.cfg, I got 20 fps in Bleach with no bots or clients (except myself ofcourse), in the *currently* unreleased Release Candidate, so don't come talking about no "Nexuiz will be 3x faster in 2.3" crap, cause in 2.2.3 I got a steady 1 fps, and generally speaking 20fps isn't nice for a game that looks like Q2 (low.cfg) when the computer can run Steam games and Battlefield games perfectly fine. The SDL build gave me a couple of fps more, and -notexturenonpoweroftwo made no difference, also turning off vbo made no difference.

Someone mentioned a D3D wrapper possibly giving better performance, but after a good ol' while of googling, I just couldn't find one. Besides it sounds to me like a bad solution to a real problem.

Any ideas or suggestions?

Also, It'd be nice to hear what kind of experience other people have of playing Nexuiz on Vista (not sure if there's a difference between 32 and 64 bit).

Urre wrote:[..], so don't come talking about no "Nexuiz will be 3x faster in 2.3" crap, cause in 2.2.3 I got a steady 1 fps, and generally speaking 20fps isn't nice for a game that looks like Q2 (low.cfg) [..]

Hey, that's 20x faster than 2.2.3! Awesome! (just kidding )

Afaik you're right: it should work after installing the drivers from nvidia.com (that wrapper doesn't exist afaik), but since i have little experience vista, i can only guess what's wrong... Have you tried other OpenGL games/apps? Are you using aero (or whatever that 3d desktop is called)? If so, try to disable it.

I run Nexuiz under Vista with the following configuration:

AMD Sempron 3000+ (1.8 GHz)
1 GB RAM
250 GB SATA HD
Geforce 6200 with 256 MB RAM
nVidia driver version 158.24

Nexuiz 2.3 test runs at 1024x768 with what I'd call medium graphics settings with >50 fps. I suspect that your problem is strictly driver-related.

Note: Whether Aero runs or not makes no difference on the frame rate whatsoever.

For my test system, it works fine, see http://divverent.planetnexuiz.de/benchresults.txt - same performance as on XP. But it's a Quadro... still, shouldn't make a difference, it's the same driver that also is used for Geforce cards.

Admittedly, it's a 64bit system and I have never tried Vista 32bit, but I really don't think that's the reason why mine works well.

Hmm you could try to start Nexuiz with the startup parameter -notexturenonpoweroftwo and see if that helps.. Also try disabling the Vertex Buffer Objects in the Options/Video menu..

/me coughs

I never succeeded in using Vista's OGL wrapper (it crashed when I tried it), but maybe adding -notexturenonpoweroftwo helps...

Code: Select all

nexuiz -notexturenonpoweroftwo -gl_driver opengl32.dll

I never tried this combination.

The official 2.3 release for some reason actually gave okay performance, but still not what I would expect. It was worse than on the XP computer with lower overall specs, but perfectly playable now. So generally speaking it's still weird that it'd work so bad

Its still strange to hear so different stuff about vista.. some say they can run Nexuiz quite tell, some can't..
someone on irc could run Nexuiz on vista only the -notexturenonpoweroftwo option.. Vista seems to be total crap for opengl if things are that random

There's only one thing I have to say about vista. It could be nice to you on one PC, but when you use it on another it craps out on you. Why? I have no freaking clue. Probably involves the video drivers or something. I have vista, so I think I'll make a new partition for it to test it out I guess...

Windows Vista has the same problem Windows XP had in the first year after its release: Sub-optimal drivers. From what I've gathered on the forum ATI users are worse off than nVidia users. Still, the current nVidia drivers are not as good as the XP drivers. OpenGL games like Nexuiz are suffering more than DirectX-based games.

One example: TORCS. Running in windowed mode, at the exact same graphics settings, I get 25-30 fps under Windows Vista, and >60 fps under Fedora 7. Note that I haven't tried running TORCS with Aero turned off; I doubt that it's going to make much of a difference though.

Bottom line: As long as ATI and nVidia don't get their act together, gaming under Windows Vista will always be an adventure in itself.