The official blog of the Electronic Punk - owner and administrator of OSNN.
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Be sure to check out my twitter feed for other life changing comments.
Vista Drivers – May Edition
Posted May 22nd, 2007 at 3:26am by Electronic Punk
So the last time I covered this was before Windows Vista was officially available and as far as drivers go things have been ok – but not perfect. I was thinking that things were progressing nicely but it has been seven months since RTM and nearly four since GA! Having both an NVIDIA card and a Creative card and visiting forums supporting their products regularly, I have seen sites created trying to sue them for not supporting an Operating System that was announced after the product shipped, amusing how immature and clueless some people are – myself to some extent so I have done some reading up on it all day. Here is my current hardware:
Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Fatal1ty Edition
ObviouslyVista is different to Windows XP and the audio changes are a fine example. Vista has moved the audio stack out of kernel and into user mode and part of that change has meant that Directsound3D can no longer be hardware accelerated. As EAX is an extension of Directsound3D it also can no longer be hardware accelerated either. OpenAL will still work as expected though and hopefully we will see a resolution. I wonder what the next generation brings – I don’t think I really want to change to an onboard solution yet, they are improving but I do find that the Creative X-Fi was a fantastic bit of kit, but no more really – even playing mp3s keeps my single core CPU busy. Creative are looking at releasing new drivers within the next few weeks that will “reduce CPU usage”
They have blamed the delay in development on Microsoft for not releasing documentation, but it doesn’t explain them posting that they have managed to optimise the drivers to reduce the CPU load and fix all these issues with the last release of drivers but are going to make us wait a few weeks so they can be Microsoft certified (a process that generally takes NVIDIA a week).
Ironically it was driver issues with the original Sound Blaster Live card in Windows98 that was one issue that prompted Microsoft to move to a host-based audio strategy with Windows Vista.
So the latest drivers are ok, but in this day and age I would expect to be able to move a window around my desktop without causing a playing .mp3 file to start skipping – but then I do have high expectations. My machine is only single core, but so was my Pentium II under Windows 95 and that didn’t complain.
NVIDIA Nforce 4 AMD Motherboard
While most of this set worked out of the box, you would still expect a good working official release. The 15.00 is shocking and doesn’t even install RAID drivers or the management utility. I forced installation with a leaked set and it integrates into the NVIDIA control panel quite nicely. You can find a set here: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=91663 that I haven’t looked at yet which apparently installs nicely. It also helps with the issue where on rebooting the hard disks actually spin down only to have to spin up again – then constantly spinning up and down during operation. I can’t help but feel these drivers are just kind of hacked together. I am constantly also having to reinstall my network card drives as well for some reason which could be related to an incompatibility to Virtual PC 2007. I will install those drivers a little later, currently using a previous leak.
NVIDIA Geforce 7800 GTX
It has been good to watch the quality of these drivers improve over the last seven months, at that time I couldn’t even get the Half-life 2 menu screen to load nicely – now I can play Counter-strike without once thinking about performance or artefacts. 158.42 (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=91473 ) seems to be a Geforce 8800 series release only, but I suspect it can be modified to work with them all, a few days previous to that I also leaked 160.03 (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=91120 ) which I am currently still using. I still can’t get a high enough frame rate to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and artefacts are still everywhere in the F.E.A.R. expansion pack so I can only assume that both games feature too many dots in the title. I also tried Splinter Cell 3, but when Windows told me that Starforce needed to be updated because it had been blocked I got cold feet and used the removal utility. I am looking forward to seeing the continued improvements and how evolution of the control panel will go (there are lots options in there once you install nTune and Mediashield correctly.
Logitech MX Revolution & DiNova Edge Keyboard
So here we have two devices that are considered to be Advanced Peripherals (http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/pr...B/EN,crid=2673 ), bother devices are “Certified for Windows Vista” and behave as such. There are a few glitches here and there and the odd option missing but in general the devices both work fine and both use the same version 3.30 of Logitech Setpoint – the only real shame is that they can’t somehow share their dongle, but they are sold separately so it can’t be avoided. Even the ‘battery low’ popup works in Vista and will flash faster as the devices battery gets lower and lower.
Microsoft Lifecam VX-6000
So what we have here is a webcam that must have known Vista was coming but seems to be among the only hardware on the Microsoft site that isn’t currently Windows Vista certified. At first glance I thought it might mean that Microsoft weren’t certifying their own hardware but I see mice, Xbox 360 control pads and keyboards all certified but nothing on this products own page ( http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/di...e_tab=overview ) shows nothing!
I am very disappointed with this camera really, the drivers haven’t been updated for months and this device is constantly ‘disconnecting’ from my system but remaining on, the only way I can resume the video call I might be in is to actually crawl under my desk, disconnect then reconnect the device and restart the video call. I am also not impressed by the video quality at all - a very disappointing purchase.
I will be looking at getting a Logitech Quickcam Ultra Vision at some point but I am going to be doing some reading up so I don’t get burnt again, damn webcams always seem to give me hassle, I can almost understand Logitech not bothering to support Windows XP x64 Edition, but I would have expected better drivers from a Microsoft product on a Microsoft platform.
So what is next? My system is two years old so I will be considering upgrading soon; I always hate upgrading though when I know something better is just hiding in the wings.
With the release of the latest ATI Radeon HD series I was really hoping to switch back to ATI cards as I am really impressed with their driver model, but it seems the hardware is not up to scratch and the NVIDIA 8800 is still the king. I do however want to check the AMD Phenom stuff (I rather fancy eight cores!) but it makes me wonder if having an AMD chipset and an NVIDIA video card will ever be an optimal solution?
Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Fatal1ty Edition
ObviouslyVista is different to Windows XP and the audio changes are a fine example. Vista has moved the audio stack out of kernel and into user mode and part of that change has meant that Directsound3D can no longer be hardware accelerated. As EAX is an extension of Directsound3D it also can no longer be hardware accelerated either. OpenAL will still work as expected though and hopefully we will see a resolution. I wonder what the next generation brings – I don’t think I really want to change to an onboard solution yet, they are improving but I do find that the Creative X-Fi was a fantastic bit of kit, but no more really – even playing mp3s keeps my single core CPU busy. Creative are looking at releasing new drivers within the next few weeks that will “reduce CPU usage”
They have blamed the delay in development on Microsoft for not releasing documentation, but it doesn’t explain them posting that they have managed to optimise the drivers to reduce the CPU load and fix all these issues with the last release of drivers but are going to make us wait a few weeks so they can be Microsoft certified (a process that generally takes NVIDIA a week).
Ironically it was driver issues with the original Sound Blaster Live card in Windows98 that was one issue that prompted Microsoft to move to a host-based audio strategy with Windows Vista.
So the latest drivers are ok, but in this day and age I would expect to be able to move a window around my desktop without causing a playing .mp3 file to start skipping – but then I do have high expectations. My machine is only single core, but so was my Pentium II under Windows 95 and that didn’t complain.
NVIDIA Nforce 4 AMD Motherboard
While most of this set worked out of the box, you would still expect a good working official release. The 15.00 is shocking and doesn’t even install RAID drivers or the management utility. I forced installation with a leaked set and it integrates into the NVIDIA control panel quite nicely. You can find a set here: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=91663 that I haven’t looked at yet which apparently installs nicely. It also helps with the issue where on rebooting the hard disks actually spin down only to have to spin up again – then constantly spinning up and down during operation. I can’t help but feel these drivers are just kind of hacked together. I am constantly also having to reinstall my network card drives as well for some reason which could be related to an incompatibility to Virtual PC 2007. I will install those drivers a little later, currently using a previous leak.
NVIDIA Geforce 7800 GTX
It has been good to watch the quality of these drivers improve over the last seven months, at that time I couldn’t even get the Half-life 2 menu screen to load nicely – now I can play Counter-strike without once thinking about performance or artefacts. 158.42 (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=91473 ) seems to be a Geforce 8800 series release only, but I suspect it can be modified to work with them all, a few days previous to that I also leaked 160.03 (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=91120 ) which I am currently still using. I still can’t get a high enough frame rate to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and artefacts are still everywhere in the F.E.A.R. expansion pack so I can only assume that both games feature too many dots in the title. I also tried Splinter Cell 3, but when Windows told me that Starforce needed to be updated because it had been blocked I got cold feet and used the removal utility. I am looking forward to seeing the continued improvements and how evolution of the control panel will go (there are lots options in there once you install nTune and Mediashield correctly.
Logitech MX Revolution & DiNova Edge Keyboard
So here we have two devices that are considered to be Advanced Peripherals (http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/pr...B/EN,crid=2673 ), bother devices are “Certified for Windows Vista” and behave as such. There are a few glitches here and there and the odd option missing but in general the devices both work fine and both use the same version 3.30 of Logitech Setpoint – the only real shame is that they can’t somehow share their dongle, but they are sold separately so it can’t be avoided. Even the ‘battery low’ popup works in Vista and will flash faster as the devices battery gets lower and lower.
Microsoft Lifecam VX-6000
So what we have here is a webcam that must have known Vista was coming but seems to be among the only hardware on the Microsoft site that isn’t currently Windows Vista certified. At first glance I thought it might mean that Microsoft weren’t certifying their own hardware but I see mice, Xbox 360 control pads and keyboards all certified but nothing on this products own page ( http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/di...e_tab=overview ) shows nothing!
I am very disappointed with this camera really, the drivers haven’t been updated for months and this device is constantly ‘disconnecting’ from my system but remaining on, the only way I can resume the video call I might be in is to actually crawl under my desk, disconnect then reconnect the device and restart the video call. I am also not impressed by the video quality at all - a very disappointing purchase.
I will be looking at getting a Logitech Quickcam Ultra Vision at some point but I am going to be doing some reading up so I don’t get burnt again, damn webcams always seem to give me hassle, I can almost understand Logitech not bothering to support Windows XP x64 Edition, but I would have expected better drivers from a Microsoft product on a Microsoft platform.
So what is next? My system is two years old so I will be considering upgrading soon; I always hate upgrading though when I know something better is just hiding in the wings.
With the release of the latest ATI Radeon HD series I was really hoping to switch back to ATI cards as I am really impressed with their driver model, but it seems the hardware is not up to scratch and the NVIDIA 8800 is still the king. I do however want to check the AMD Phenom stuff (I rather fancy eight cores!) but it makes me wonder if having an AMD chipset and an NVIDIA video card will ever be an optimal solution?
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