the Windows Vista OpenGL Debate


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Hey Visentinel,

You're information is skewed radically and you can't spell.

Take your own advice and read before posting. Both the LDDM specification, which has been out for months, and a dictionary.

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Im a great speller i just dont care about typing... if you cant read it then your not very good with abreviated spelling

wats that got to do with this anyway ?

Specifications and Physical source code are 2 very different things.

And Again i will state this is not my information, if you think its skewed take it up in the opengl.org forums and the gamedev forums not me coz it will make zero difference to me.

I will enjoy watching your comments been ripped appart by their members ;P

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Heres a nice post to answer a few questions here

I think I can point out where the problem is from a technical point of view. The issue is that Vista shuts down the Aero system if you have an unsigned driver installed, it does so to defend the DRM enforcement system. The (ahem)problem... is that the owner of the computer might install a custom driver and try to capture video or potentially even try to use the video card to read system RAM. The owner of the computer is considered a security threat.

From Microsoft's point of view any code that can talk to the video hardware is a security threat to their DRM lockdown. They will not sign any driver that has not undergone an extensive security audit. (BTW, does anyone know how much Micrsoft charges for this testing and certification?)

This is why it is difficult but possible for the the video card manufacturers to create the required drivers. They would need information and assistance from Microsoft and the drivers would have to be completely locked down, especially no capability to pass on arbitrary extended commands to the hardware. It also means it is almost impossible for anyone else to create independant drivers. An interesting side note is that even if a driver is released under the GPL with full source code, that source is completely useless. Any attempt to modify and recompile the source - as the GPL requires the right to do - results in a nonfunctional driver. Windows will see that no valid signature and again go into braindamaged reduced functionality mode.

Another point that people have missed is that if you do load a nonsigned driver you do not merely drop to the basic Windows interface, you may also lose running applications. When Aero gets locked out I *think* the whole security system gets locked out. Dropping to the basic desktop is more than mere nuisance, any application utilizing the security system may be locked out for the duration. To say that this behaviour is "completely unacceptable" in commercial software would be quite the understatement. Other random software would freeze or die whenever your driver was loaded.

From Gamedev Page 6

Well... That Sucks ;)

GG OpenGL :laugh:

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Heres a nice post to answer a few questions here

From Gamedev Page 6

Well... That Sucks ;)

GG OpenGL  :laugh:

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So makes sense, and the only thing people lose is a little speed in windowed opengl apps (or the aero (security?) interface turns off and you get full speed). I just can't see what you're trol..I mean complaining about buddy.

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I get the feeling that this post was meant to have two purposes, 1) to discuss the logical purpose of Microsoft's openGL decision, and 2) to get people to go to Visentinel's site. I don't think this is the way threads are supposed to be...

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So makes sense, and the only thing people lose is a little speed in windowed opengl apps (or the aero (security?) interface turns off and you get full speed). I just can't see what you're trol..I mean complaining about buddy.

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No the aero turns off first then the windowed app runs, it only runs at slow speed if you use the openGL 1.4 thru d3d if your video card drivers dont have their own openGL ICD

u cant have both only one or the other depending on your video card drivers.

But hell, youd know this if you had read up ! and then youd know what im trol... complaining about to.

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I get the feeling that this post was meant to have two purposes, 1) to discuss the logical purpose of Microsoft's openGL decision, and 2) to get people to go to Visentinel's site.? I don't think this is the way threads are supposed to be...

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1. is true but people not reading up the 2 forum threads is cuasing so much confusion, people are saying things that have been said to death and disproven many times on the other 2 threads on gamedev and opengl.org

and 2. ? how is that true ? people are always making others go to sites that contain the news items they want to discuss, just becuase the url magicly matches my username makes that no less indeacent.

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No the aero turns off first then the windowed app runs, it only runs at slow speed if you use the openGL 1.4 thru d3d if your video card drivers dont have their own openGL ICD

u cant have both only one or the other depending on your video card drivers.

But hell, youd know this if you had read up ! and then youd know what im trol... complaining about to.

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That's exactly wtf I said..

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O_o you said you leave it on and u get slow opengl or turn it off and u get fast opengl ?

but instead its one or the other depending on driver support.

and that still doesnt address the fullscreen support.

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O_o you said you leave it on and u get slow opengl or turn it off and u get fast opengl ?

but instead its one or the other depending on driver support.

and that still doesnt address the fullscreen support.

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I didn't explicitly say "user pushes a button and it turns off" and I didn't mean it that way either. And what do you mean it doesn't address fullscreen support, if you have a opengl ICD from your video card manufacturer you get full speed if not you get layered speed, which is an improvement from XP where you get software speed without the opengl ICD from the manufacturer. Like I said, what's to complain about? It's not the best one could wish for but it's certainly not the sky falling since it's no worse than today's solutions.

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First off, spelling has a lot to do with discussions and debates. If you can't spell, no one takes you seriously or even cares what you have to say.

Second, I've developed a device driver for Windows XP and we only looked at a specification for the driver model and we were never provided any source code; none at all. Microsoft does not have to release a step-by-step tutorial on how to write device drivers for their operating systems when they already have released a specification with which a real company could develop a very, very functional driver.

Point-in-short: I never looked at source code for a device driver, but from the specification of the driver model for Windows XP, I was able to write a clean driver that did what it needed to do.

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Check out the Vista one please.

Spelling ? thats like not taking a bald man seriously coz he has no hair, i just type nice and fast, if u cant understand it, like i said you have issues with reading shorthand.

you will find every word in this post properly spelt Sept for " coz " and i don't need to rite because do i ? Wat's the difference ? their not spelling mistakes their shorthand spelling, people speak it, wats wrong with writing it ? nobody has a problem with lol or rofl or lmfao or rofl

what your saying is just double standard, if people choose to ignore what i say over some shorthand, well lol thats their problem.

The difference between fullscreen and windowed is " One is windowed and the other is fullscreen "

the openGL ICD support only states a windowed OpenGL ICD spport, for some reason i don't know yet fullscreen support isn't explicitly mentioned as supported.

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Indeed.

Visentinel, I have read most of the forums you're speaking of. They're wrong.

The driver signing issue has nothing to do with DRM, and it already works that way in Windows Server 2003. By default, you cannot install unsigned drivers because they haven't been tested for RELIABILITY.

That's because this happens every day:

User Joe: "Windows sucks, it always crashes."

MS Support: "Can you send a crash report?"

User Joe: "Yeah, here you go."

MS Support: "That isn't Windows crashing, it's your display driver."

User Joe: "What's the difference?"

Signing has nothing to do with OpenGL support. I don't know why you would ever think that it does. Do you think WHQL isn't going to sign a driver because it supports OpenGL? Give me a break, dude.

You've got a lot of non-sensical posts that you're taking at face value. How about you fire off an e-mail to Nvidia or ATI and ask them if they're going to support OpenGL in Vista?

I'm betting you've succeeded, though. You probably got a bunch of extra traffic to your site with this FUD.

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Check out the Vista one please.

Spelling ? thats like not taking a bald man seriously coz he has no hair, i just type nice and fast, if u cant understand it, like i said you have issues with reading shorthand.

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You also have a blonde female in your signature so all hopes of you being some sort of professional developer went out the window.

What is your point? I've just read two pages of senseless drivel and I cannot seem to find a single common theme in any of your posts.

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Check out the Vista one please.

Spelling ? thats like not taking a bald man seriously coz he has no hair, i just type nice and fast, if u cant understand it, like i said you have issues with reading shorthand.

you will find every word in this post properly spelt Sept for " coz " and i don't need to rite because do i ? Wat's the difference ? their not spelling mistakes their shorthand spelling, people speak it, wats wrong with writing it ? nobody has a problem with lol or rofl or lmfao or rofl

what your saying is just double standard, if people choose to ignore what i say over some shorthand, well lol thats their problem.

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A man having no hair does not make him more difficult to understand.

You have at least 9 spelling mistakes, and plenty of grammatical ones in that post. It makes you sound childish and immature, and makes reading your posts rather unpleasant. Your misuse of "their," where you meant "there," in several places is very confusing.

Furthermore, your errors are not "shorthand," they're just errors. LOL is an acronym, not an abbreviation.

The difference between fullscreen and windowed is " One is windowed and the other is fullscreen "

the openGL ICD support only states a windowed OpenGL ICD spport, for some reason i don't know yet fullscreen support isn't explicitly mentioned as supported.

What are you talking about?

Under Windows 2000/XP, fullscreen and windowed mode are very different things. Clearly I can't get very technical with you... but when a fullscreen OpenGL or Direct3D app is run, they take over the entire screen. They completely stop the window manager, and nothing on the screen is drawn by GDI.

In windowed mode, both Direct3D and OpenGL use special tricks that allow them to draw their portions of the screen independent of GDI, and have GDI fill in the rest of the screen.

Because of this, you can't have more than one (or possibly two, technically) Direct3D or OpenGL applications running at the same time using hardware acceleration. Vista overcomes this, because the ENTIRE SCREEN under the desktop compositor is one big Direct3D full-screen app.

When you load up an OpenGL full-screen app, it takes over the entire screen, and the window manager/desktop compositor continues doing its own thing in the background.

The problem only comes when you try to run an OpenGL application inside of the window manager - which is now a Direct3D application. Unlike GDI, Direct3D doesn't know how to "leave this area blank" so that the OpenGL "window" can show through.

So the problem is essentially the same one that GDI had, when implementing hardware acceleration in windowed-mode apps. But there are two differences:

1) Direct3D is no longer affected by this problem, since the entire desktop is Direct3D - it can just pipe its output to the compositor since they both use the same API.

2) The old trick doesn't necessarily work anymore, so we need to find new ones (like writing a mini-driver for windowed mode, turning off the DWM, or doing something else - those GPU vendors are clever folks).

So for fullscreen, nothing changes. For windowed mode, there are new challenges but they'll be overcome.

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ok I have no standing as a developer just an avid fallower of technical info.

With that said why would Microsoft, release all the technical standards for avalon and glass right now? Especially when they aren't completed projects. It doesn't make any business sense to release to your hardware developers technical information which may change.

Regardless there is NO way vista will make it to market without full backwards compatibility with existing openGL applications, that would just be a massive shot in the foot.

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you will find every word in this post properly spelt Sept for " coz " and i don't need to rite because do i ? Wat's the difference ? their not spelling mistakes their shorthand spelling, people speak it, wats wrong with writing it ? nobody has a problem with lol or rofl or lmfao or rofl

what your saying is just double standard, if people choose to ignore what i say over some shorthand, well lol thats their problem.

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First off "spelt" is not a word....not in the meaning you are using it for. I suggest getting a dictionary

Next, Shorthand does not consist merely of eliminating letters from words...you are not typing in shorthand

I suggest you read/learn shorthand before you try to claim that you are using it, and I suggest you look up in a dictionary what spelt is.

As for the issue at hand...you really do not have a clue what you are talking about, i'm not going to bother going into details as "threedaysdwn" has done an excellent job of it as is.

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@threedaysdwn: thanks for the good clarification on this topic. its nice to hear from someone who obviously knows what they're talking about.

@qumahlin: haha. i never knew that's what spelt was for. but i damn sure knew it wasn't anything to do with spelling/grammar...

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Actually, not to nitpick... but "spelt" is an accepted conjugation of "spell." It's just very uncommon.

From Dictionary.com:

spell1? ? ( P )? Pronunciation Key? (spl)

v. spelled, or spelt (splt) spell?ing, spells

v. tr.

To name or write in order the letters constituting (a word or part of a word).

To constitute the letters of (a word): These letters spell animal.

To add up to; signify: Their unwise investment could spell financial ruin.

Might be US-specific. Either way, I don't like it ei:per :p

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Il just haveto repeat myself.

Spelling or spelt or whatever mean the same thing, your just looking for ways to discredit me, but I'm sure the smarter people on neowin can see rite through your nonsensical attempts.

I did not write those so i dono why people keep saying " I Said "

And where did i say i am or want to be a developer... I'm just a gamer looking for the interests of myself and other gamers who don't want opengl to die, sure we may love our D3D but the competition between opengl and d3d help keep the PC gaming scene active and constantly moving forward in graphical innovation.

I dono why people keep dismissing this when it may very well be the worst thing to happen to OpenGL.org in many years.

And I'm done.

yous can go back to your fairy worlds and pretend nothings wrong.

See this thread could have gone along like the other ones, yet its just been nonstop crop circles and **** been thrown around, and AGAIN il mention people link others to news articles everyday, just because the url magicaly matches my username doesn't make it any less indecent.

ffs.

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You're "just a gamer?"

Then why do you care? This issue doesn't even affect games unless you play your OpenGL games in a window. And even then I'm very confident that you won't have any problems.

Unlike you, I am a developer, at Microsoft no less. I know how Windows works. I tried to explain this issue to you but you just keep repeating yourself and what you're saying doesn't make any sense.

The issue that was brought up only affects technical applications like Maya, 3D Studio, etc - which run in windowed mode GL. And again I'm telling you that it would be disasterous for Microsoft if we didn't maintain compatability with those applications - so it will be there. That's really all I can say on this issue.

Everything I post here is personal opinion and is not read or approved by my employer before it is posted. No warranties or other guarantees will be offered as to the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here.

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Vis, I don't think you're understanding something very simple here. Almost nothing is changing. Microsoft is supporting OpenGL natively through DirectX because WPF uses DirectX, and that's the only way to support it without disabling Aero Glass. Third party drivers will still provide fully accelerated OpenGL implementations. Microsoft by default offers a wrapped implementation because that's what they have to do if they want to support OpenGL at all and still have the composited desktop rendering.

Microsoft doesn't even have to support OpenGL out of the box! Why should they? It's not their product.

I just can't fathom how you don't understand this. Nothing is crippled here.

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There was just over a month that the strong word going around backed by evidence was that Vista would not support OpenGL over version 1.4

Just this month it was cleared

For a whole month me and allot of people where left with the notion that vista was taking OpenGL R I T E :rofl: of the map.

What you expect ?

Everyone was crying foul.

At least admit you know that -.-

As u can tell there was a few angry mobs in a few forums.

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