Open GL on vista

Why is OpenGL so slow (like software slow!) rendering on vista? Who is to blame for this is it MS (Mabe they are terrified of OGL3 :/ ) or the assumption on the driver manufacturers that windows users only care or know about direct3d? I heard something about it being emulated by DX. Is this true or is this only true if the driver doesnt have direct OGL support? Im confused.

Isnt it a bit dumb considering much of cutting edge 3d stuff for games, movies, scientific simulations etc is designed around openGL first, as its most portable and may encourage people to take more serious R&D onto other platforms? I can think the only reason could be to make OGL 'look bad' compared to D3D or something when in reality it is reasonably well matched (DX8/9 vs GL2.0)

OpenGl works fine on my 3 vista boxes (one ATI, one Nvidia and one Intel gfx card). All with similar performance to Direct3D.

All it needed was an update of drivers (just like DirectX).

Microsoft itself has never had good support for OpenGL, it's always been down to the gfx card manufacturers.

Ive got a new ATI card on a tripple boot PC and when running OGL with shadows, shaders, whistles and bells on Linux looks and feels almost identical to the same thing running in DX9 on vista/xp.

OGL on XP is a little less smooth than on linux but not that much difference. However when running OGL on the same machine in vista its like its running... no, walking in software mode, especially when the poly count goes up.

tested in fullscreen?
In windowed mode, you need to have a significantly more powerfull card unless you disabled any aero and are on Win2k style

I'll check my settings, but I don't remember disabling anything to make OGL run in a vista window.

OpenGL is screwed on my Vista box.

I can't run anything that requires OpenGL - at all. I'm ditching my ATI card soon and going back to Nvidia. My card is pretty old (Radeon 9600) and the latest drivers only seem to support it as an afterthought.

now you mention it, no, i always develop in a window, will try layter. :/

Not really, I don't think. OpenGL has always been a niche API. It's popular among indies, but rarely used by professional game development studios. It's quite popular in scientific and 3d rendering applications, but those are such high end stuff that they don't have to worry about customer support. I mean you're not going to spend $10k on Houdini and throw it away because you can't be bothered to download drivers, are you? But you sure might download a game demo and uninstall it because it doesn't work out of the box.

I think the simple truth is that OpenGL drivers aren't better because they're not important enough to the average person. If bad OpenGL support was costing ATI or Intel enough money, you can bet your ass they'd be doing more. Microsoft have no great love for OpenGL, but then they never did, nor did they need to. Nope, I think you can safely blame the patchy OpenGL support in Vista on poor driver support. ( And BTW is it just me or have AMD/ATI just gone into self-destruct mode lately? They can't seem to do anything right. )

Tell me youre joking :P

This is just what i scraped of wiki: America's Army ,Baldur's Gate 2 – Defaults to D3D ,Call of Duty ,City of Heroes ,City of Villains ,Counter-Strike ,Darwinia, Doom 3 ,Dwarf Fortress ,Enemy Territory: Quake Wars ,Far Cry – Defaults to D3D ,Frets On Fire ,Half-Life (not Half-Life 2) ,Homeworld 2 ,Neverwinter Nights ,Prey ,Quake series ,Rage ,Serious Sam ,Serious Sam 2 – Defaults to D3D ,Starsiege: Tribes ,Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy ,Ultima IX: Ascension ,Unreal series ,Warcraft 3 - Defaults to D3D in Windows ,wolfenstein: Enemy Territory ,World of Warcraft - Defaults to D3D in Windows

All developed utilising Open GL. And offer both renderers in the final product. One reason is it makes it more portable with diffrent platforms & consoles. What is it the WII and PS3 use? Certainly not DX9, its custom OGL.

I would have said very often in the world of serious 3D games development the DirectX renderer adaption is often quite a late addition.

By saying that, you are excluding the following, Apple, linux, unix, BSD, nintendo, sony and basically any system that does 3D graphics that doesnt involve windows or Xbox in front of it. Of course its important to the average person.

Ditto, if your list of ~30 games which do use OpenGL was supposed to impress me.

You realize you have games there which are ten years old? How many games do you think have been released in the past ten years? Enough to make your list about 0.01% of the total? If I made a list of all the games which *don't* use OpenGL, I'd probably bring the forum down. EDIT: Which I've just realised wouldn't have been much of an achievement before the recent server move :P


It makes no odds what they use, because porting from PC to console ( or vice versa ) has far greater issues to solve than an API change. Changing API is usually the least of their worries. It's like people who think you have to write a game in C++ if it's going to get a console port. The language and the API pale into insignificance in the world of porting.

I wasnt trying to impress anyone, thats just a few examples i found on wiki but happens to include some of the market leading games of recent years. So to say that its rarely used in pro game development makes no sense. If anything is more popular with 'indies' its directX simply because the majority of us are on windows platform and for most their favorite engine/language is reliant on it (and for no other reason).

Really? Because I almost thought you were agreeing with me when you came up with a list of 30 games in ten years. In fact, I was thinking of revising "rarely" to "very rarely" after your pointer. I think the fact that they actually maintain a list ( partial or otherwise ) on a Wiki tells you how rare it is. I don't imagine the C++ Wiki maintains a list of games which were written in C++.

During the beta test when I was using XP drivers for my GeForce 6600, OpenGL ran very comparably to on XP (in some instances outshining XP). I doubt this has changed, so I would suggest that OpenGL is actually being software rendered on your machine.

I'd blame your drivers.

I have the problem where OGL simply wont initialise. :-(

It is the drivers with both nvidia and ati releasing new cards i think there first concern is how well they run in benchmarks and direct x games to make them review well. open gl performance is second. hopefully this will be ironed out when newer drivers come in.

It says simply "some notable games" possibly meaning "a few well known PC examples". An actual list of OpenGL based professionally developed games would be huge featuring most 3d console and arcade games over the years (including several windows ones).

I If you meant for most windows/xbox games, then you are probably right so i do agree with you on that much.
(but i was talking about all platforms in general, not just MS's own).

So true :D


Probably :(
Its really annoying me though, it means i keep having to change the dev-engine's rendererer switches each time i change from my linuxpc to my windows one. When I release the windows version, i would rather think about DX mods then, not have to change code (allbeit a few lines) each time i decide to boot one system or the other.

a lot of professional 3D apps actually have better DX support than GL now, giving you aproximate shader represantations of your materials, and shadows in realtime in viewports, so you don't have to test render so much for pre rendered video work.

GL seems to only really have basic rendering still in most 3D apps, without any shader aproximation of materials and effects.

The only 3dapp i know that favours directx is 3dsmax.

DirectX 10 and OpenGL 2.1 are nearly identical in terms of capabilities and performance. They each have slight advantages and disadvantages compared to the other.

ATI (now AMD/ATI) does not produce OpenGL-compliant drivers on Windows. In fact, it would be better if ATI stopped claiming they support OpenGL at all. I was just thinking that their claimed support for OpenGL might be grounds for a class action lawsuit.

Currently, the most prominent gaming application using OpenGL is id Software's id Tech 5, which is being used to create id's new game, "Rage".

Unlike DirectX, which frequently undergoes major revisions, OpenGL has maintained the same API, while still able to add all the functionality 10 versions of DirectX have added. One consequence of this approach is that many outdated or nonoptimal techniques are still supported. This may be a contributing factor to ATI's apparent inability to produce working drivers.

OpenGL 3 is a major revision which will eliminate much of the old legacy features, including client-side vertex arrays and the fixed function pipeline. This will greatly simplify the task of writing drivers, so that hopefully AMD/ATI will be able to provide working drivers.

I've never had any problems with ATI and OpenGL .. I've been using X600 Mobility, X800Pro, X1950XTX extensively this year, and none of them have had any problems running OpenGL stuff.

Back on topic, the latest machine we've got runs Vista with a GeForce 8800GT, and OpenGL is working fine though I haven't done any comparisons between OpenGL and DirectX on it.

How much shader work have you done?

All the stuff I'm doing in OpenGL uses shaders, so quite a bit.

Better test it on one of ATI's newer cards before you release anything.

Just updated my driver and its better but still nowhere near the speed of XP or linux

nVidia > ATI

Actually, the only ATI card I ever owned (and still have, though don't use) is a Rage 128. I really shouldn't disparage them too much :)

nVidia have their share of problems. Trying to find a supported method of installing their drivers on this laptop is impossible. I have to resort to hackery because, for some godawful marketing reason (I presume), only the OEM's are allowed to distribute mobile nVidia drivers. i.e, slow drivers with poor SLI support.

Switching from the desktop was supposed to be easy. I am going to have a think about returning this laptop and ordering a Phantom-X instead. It's still a laptop, but it's the closes thing to a mobile desktop I've ever seen.

In terms of Shaders, Nvidia does have much nicer support for developers, while ATI is closer to the actual specification.
eg. ati doesn't typecast, so a = 1 where a is a float gives an error as it should be a = 1.0 (Nvidia is fine with either, correctly typecasting).

I've found that most openGL works well on both platforms (at one time ATI really was in the lead in terms of support, but the last few rounds of drivers have been getting gradually worse), but Nvidia really is now my prefered platform.

Ive done a bit of testing tonight. Im throwing together a simple shootemup (with some hi-res meshes) using irrlicht+bmax to test a few things. Ive added a frame limiter that caps all frames to screen updates at 100 fps (as in screen drawing frames not logic 'fps').

Now, when using ubuntu+bmax+irrlicht in OpenGL im pulling 100 frames easily. If I turn the cap off, i get severe screen tearing (as expected) and the FPS count is up in the 300s!!.
On the other side of the fence on the exact same machine vista+bmax+irrlicht in openGL the frame count for the same thing is only 40-50 depending on how much is on the screen, no where near the 100 frame capping.

wierd :/

-edit-

This is really wierd, up im getting only 70fps in DirectX9 Mode! What is vista doing to the performance?!?! XP using DX and OGL both meet the capping with no problems.
If this is the 'future' then i want a time machine :(

Try with XP drivers and Vista and let us know if it changes anything...

XPDM + vista = opengl bye, Aero Glass bye

Thats what I found out the "head against the wall way" when my tablet first was deliveried with Vista Business ...
Now with XP I actually can use Max2D in GL mode with the exactly same driver (as that intel card does not have a WDDM driver, only XPDM)

Im actually surprised you can get any OGL at all with a intel card. If someone offered me a free PC/laptop with an intel graphics card, i dont think id even want it. I had nothing put problems with the last intel GPU i had... NEVER again (the hours i wasted!!)

Will try that tonight.

OpenGL + Intel910 +sucky laptop = Fine here! (xp though)
OpenGL + Intel GMA 3000 + Vista = Also fine.

I sometimes wonder how I have so few problems when I read threads like the one above ;)

Tried the XP drivers and got a BSOD :(

Rebooted in safemode and removed them and reinstalled the one that came with my machine. I removed the fancy desktop and put it in classic mode. Also removed all the widgets and fudgits. Now im just about getting 100FPS in DX9 mode so its still struggling at meeting the capping limit. :/

All right, well that works for nVidia drivers anyway ;]

good 2 know, thx :)
My other machine (DTop) is nvidia so when the time of "upgrade enforcement" comes, i will keep that in mind.