BMax on Dell Inspiron 1501 Notebook

My daughter bought one of the above laptops. It comes with Vista, etc, etc. I tested my own code examples. the popular BMax game "Annihilation" and GA's framework test.

Graphics Card: ATI Radeon Express 1150

"Annihilation" - In OpenGL mode, things ran horribly. Very slow, choppy, etc. Annihilation reported frame rates of less than three fps. In DirectX mode, things were much better. Full screen ran flawless, very smooth, very fast in all tests. Windowed mode was choppy. The mouse was very erratic. In full screen mode frame rates were in the 90's to 100's in all tests. In windowed mode, frame rates were never out of the 30's. In both full screen and windowed, audio played fine.

VSYNC is useless, VSYNC needs to be on on this laptop, otherwise horrible tearing, etc.

Onto my own code tests. Open GL didn't work at all. DirectX ran fine in full screen, windowed mode was choppy as before. The MGE Bass Module worked flawlessly I'm happy to report.

(My previous DirectX 8 engine in VB6 suffered the same choppiness in windowed mode, so it wasn't just related to DX7. phew...!)

GA's framework test "Attack of the Mutant Greys" suffered the same results. OpenGL mode fails. Plus there was no sound/music. Full screen mode ran smooth as butter, very nice! Windowed mode was choppy just like the other tests.

This was my first time playing around with Vista. Nice operating system, I'm a little concerned about creating fast action games however. Perhaps desktop pc's will perform better.

just cause it's new doesn't mean it has the latest drivers... update and try a again is the "order of the day" ;)

one thing though, I'm pretty sure that is a shared memory adapter, I don't have any experience with those.

Yes, "we" understand the wonderful concept of updating drivers, but normal casual users do not. "I just bought a new pc, why are they telling me to update drivers?". I'm sure the above test results will be typical on alot of machines, so coder beware. ;)

If Windows Vista would do so, this would be great.
Fact is if the driver has no OpenGL, it will just break actually.

Thats what I had to find out with Windows Vista on my Tablet (Intel GMA900 which is not WDDM capable).


MGE: thats correct but only users with problems are affected and they are normally willing to understand the common behavior :-)
First line in the FAQ / Readme Problem is: If you are having graphical problems or if the application is running very slow, you are eventually suffering by outdated graphic drivers. Please check your system or card creators page for more recent drivers. (CDs shipped with systems and components often don't have the most current drivers)

Especially Vista users have to be aware what they bought, they can't expect it to run on the same level as WindowsXP, therefor it is just too broken at the moment. (which they will find out at latest the moment where UAC is silently killing apps)

well, as game "publishers" I think we need to take it upon ourselves to inform the "casual user" about updated graphics drivers... otherwise I think it would be wise to stick to GDI.

it's not Max's fault your Vista computer came an incomplete driver set. I do consider this mostly just vista newness pains though and more complete drivers will be shipping with new computers in the future. this "old driver" problem though is not just with OpenGL though. Someone wasn't able to play my invaders from space on a 1-2 year old XP machine in either DX or opengl. once they upgraded the drivers both worked as expected.

It's a ridiculous situation that anyone could come to such a conclusion given the immense resources that even budget laptops enjoy these days -- far more RAM and far higher clock speeds than any of the fast action arcade machines I enjoyed as a youth. Lots of consumers seem to be going for budget machines (so no high-end GFX for the big commercial games) while OpenGL now comes as absent -- as a games platform the PC looks like a right shabby mess at the moment.

EDIT: Oh I just wanted to be clear that I'm not criticising MGE there -- it's really daft that a new Inspiron with Vista performs worse out of the box than my old 1300 with XP.

Its an ATI. Its known that their DX9 and OpenGL drivers for Vista are a bad joke at the moment, no idea how the actually got the vista capable certification, even intel is better ...