Unplayably slow on Vista?

[Rasit]

Andrew_Gross said:
I upgraded my home computer to Vista a couple of days ago. So far, every program I had installed has worked flawlessly, with the exception of Dom III. It is so painfully slow, both full screen and windowed, that I am probably going to have to drop out of the PBeM game I'm in unless there's a fix for this.

Anyone have any hints for getting Dom III to run acceptably under Vista, or do I just need to hope a patch fixes it eventually?

Strange, it works perfectly on my vista development machine. I know some issues can be resolved if you disable aero.

[haileris]

There was a previous post on Vista issues. ATI OpenGL drivers have improved the experience no end so upgrade your drivers if you are using ATI graphics. I was under the impression that Nvidia had no problems in this area having included OpenGL support in their beta driver releases.

[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.

[Andrew_Gross]

Rasit said:
Strange, it works perfectly on my vista development machine. I know some issues can be resolved if you disable aero.

I'll give that a try tonight.

[Olive]

I just moved to Vista and dominions 3 seems to work fine.

[Sir_Dr_D]

I got a new computer recently, that came with Vista and I had no problems with it. Vista has a completely different look and feel to if from previous version of windows, so it takes some getting use to. But once you get used to it, I think it is a better O.S. (user interface wise.)

My main annoyance hasn't been speed. Vista tends to save files in its own location. So instead of finding your saved game files in c:\program files\dominions3\savedgame, vista saves it in your profile section in a real wierd path, {profile name}/AppData/Local/VirtualStore/Program Files/Dominions 3/Savedgames. This made playing PBEM games annoying until I got used to it.

[Rasit]

Darrel said:My main annoyance hasn't been speed. Vista tends to save files in its own location. So instead of finding your saved game files in c:\program files\dominions3\savedgame, vista saves it in your profile section in a real wierd path, {profile name}/AppData/Local/VirtualStore/Program Files/Dominions 3/Savedgames. This made playing PBEM games annoying until I got used to it.

That happens since you have installed the game under "program files". Since so many software kept trying to write to a folder that they should not have write access to Microsoft made it so anything being written to "program files" ends up in %profile name%/AppData/Local/VirtualStore/Program Files/[normal folder path].

This way they did not break all the old "malfunctioning" applications but you can still benefit from the increased security you get as running as a restricted user.

[Sir_Dr_D]

Rasit said:

That happens since you have installed the game under "program files". Since so many software kept trying to write to a folder that they should not have write access to Microsoft made it so anything being written to "program files" ends up in %profile name%/AppData/Local/VirtualStore/Program Files/[normal folder path].

This way they did not break all the old "malfunctioning" applications but you can still benefit from the increased security you get as running as a restricted user.

Ah! Thats what the term 'compatibility files' meant. Is there a place Vista recommends to save games like this other then program files then?