Unplayably slow on Vista?

[DanielM]

It has nothing to do with dom3 or drivers. A few months ago it was much talked about how Microsoft is not directly supporting OpenGL in Vista but instead passing it through Microsoft's own DirectX-interfaces. I don't understand the details, however, it means adding an extra layer of abstraction, so everything which uses OpenGL (that is pretty much every game which doesn't run exclusively on Windows) obviosly runs slower.

If this is true, it means that better drivers won't cut it but OpenGL will be always worse than DirectX - not because of some technical reason, but because Microsoft wants it this way.

Microsoft's motivation for doing this is to force game developers to use DirectX instead of OpenGL and thus killing any platform-independent development. They know from experience that the third-party developers and not Microsoft will be blamed.

[Rasit]

DanielM said:
It has nothing to do with dom3 or drivers. A few months ago it was much talked about how Microsoft is not directly supporting OpenGL in Vista but instead passing it through Microsoft's own DirectX-interfaces. I don't understand the details, however, it means adding an extra layer of abstraction, so everything which uses OpenGL (that is pretty much every game which doesn't run exclusively on Windows) obviosly runs slower.

If this is true, it means that better drivers won't cut it but OpenGL will be always worse than DirectX - not because of some technical reason, but because Microsoft wants it this way.

Microsoft's motivation for doing this is to force game developers to use DirectX instead of OpenGL and thus killing any platform-independent development. They know from experience that the third-party developers and not Microsoft will be blamed.

Oh, really?

Will My Applications Run Fast?

Performance-wise, developers can expect a decrease of around 10-15% on Windows as compared to Windows XP. Applications that use problematic cases (for example, excessive flushing, or rendering to the frontbuffer, as explained later) can see a larger performance degradation. However, expect this gap to become smaller over time while the graphics hardware vendors work on further optimizing their Windows Vista WDDM drivers.

Even DirectX will lose some performance due to Vista taking more CPU time just to run in the background.

It is up to the hardware drivers to implement the OpenGL specs and the driver support for Vista is still abysmal. That is the true reason why you lose some performance compared to DirectX.

[Cor]

I am running Vista and it works wonderfully now. I had a problem with dominions 3, but it was my ATI video card (it did not support OpenGL and was clocking 1 frame per second). I downloaded the latest driver and it works very well now.

If you are running an ATI card make sure you have the latest drivers.