Windows Vista Support

I appreciate that since Windows Vista is currently in Beta there will be very poor support for many applications but I wondered at what point we can expect SL to work with Vista. The point at which I get stuck is as SL detects the hardware. It cannot detect my Radeon9800pro as anything other than a standard GDI device.

I'm sure you know as much as the rest of us about when Vista will actually be released but while I'm doing my bit to run betas and root out bugs for the rest of the world, it'd be nice if I didn't have to reboot to XP to run my SL everytime! I'm just wondering if support will be around in time for the launch of Vista or if those of us who want to run the latest OS will have to wait for SL to catch up later.

Lee replied in another thread that they only support Retail OS's. Therefore you will see Vista support once Vista go's Retail.

We're not waiting for SL to catch up, we're waiting for other vendors to catch up with decent drivers.

Someone call Creative and make them write decent beta drivers for Audigy cards.

If you haven't already noticed three threads down i posted about windows vista

/111/7d/112580/1.html

why make multpile threads???

Because the threads can't possibly have the answers they're looking for (or want to hear) because it wasn't made by them. Thus the logical thing to do is waste harddisk space on LL's server by creating another thread that is pretty much useless.

END SARCASM

Honestly its probly because your thread is mostly people whinging about how SL doesn't work on the Vista Beta and nothing constructive is because of it.

Gabriel, I'm very sorry, you're obviously very proud of getting in before me, you've achieved quite a coup, good for you. The reason I posted again was because when you start posting in the middle of big threads you never actually get the answer you're looking for. I did however get the answer I was looking for, so thank you Katier Reitveld.

What I want to know now tho, and I may have to create a new thread for this, is why does Gabriel Malaprop insist on entering another thread and unconstructively make comments and try to advertise his own thread when my question has already been answered... see if you can answer that without linking to another thread!

Hey, I am also running Windows Vista and experiencing the exact same problem.

Before I posted, I did a search on Windwos vista and apparently someone else's computer was able to run it.
Since I'm also running an AGP ATI Radeon Card (9600XT), I can only assume the drivers for ATI AGP (or maybe PCIe as well) and Vista are not compatible with second life.
Unfortunate, but I guess it doesn't make much sense to try and fix SL for Vista when it can change before final release...

Hopefully it's something ATI or Microsoft can fix, and hopefully by Public Release 1, it will work!
For now, I'll stick to SL on my mac... since i broke Windows XP in the Vista Installation

Yes Matt, it appears that ATi drivers don't quite work with the combination of DirectX 10 and SL. Other 3D games may work OK. I would think that both ATi and Linden would want to work this out. It may not be important to ATi if this one 'game' doesn't work properly, they'll look to Linden to fix it. Since Linden don't support non-commercial, non-official releases with official support, they won't fix the problem until Vista is officially released and they have no choice. That is assuming ATi don't fix it first. Come on Linden, it can't be hard to recognise ATi cards under DirectX10 and allow them to load anyway, seriously, I can do it, why can't you? It's not a big problem, get yr fingers out!

you guys got it all wrong.. ATI DX 10 that has nothing to do with it.. Sl needs to release a debugging client or one that shuts off the hardware check.. I bet work fine its just the program checks and says wait this not on the list of things to work and bang screws you over.

Linden do somthing!

I'm pretty sure that's what I said, or at least what I meant to say. What I was saying is that since Vista is DirectX10 and the new drivers from ATi are beta, and since nVidia drivers for DirectX10 work OK with Vista, all Linden need to do is tell SL that when it sees a DirectX10 machine with ATi drivers to just let it go forward. Or they could just do it anyway, if you don't heed the warnings and decide to proceed with a non-supported GPU or some crappy integrated option then it should be up to you, rather than being told flat that SL just won't load

I'm hoping with the 600 posts now about vista they will grow up lol.

400 more to go and then they start banning anyone with vista

OK - for all those out there (like me) who wish they could play SL on their ATI powered PCs under Vista...


The ATI drivers for Vista Beta 2 have no OpenGL support yet.


This is listed as a known issue with their drivers in the ATI readme file.

Which means that there is no way whatsoever that it will work until ATI release a new driver.

Nothing short of a rewrite from the ground up of the rendering engine could be done to SL itself to change this, and the Lindens are powerless.

We are waiting on ATI, who are, sadly famous for their poor quality slow late support of OpenGL

NO OpenGL support at all? Jesus! Hmm, I wonder if I could ever run SL on one of my SGI workstations?

You know, and you'd think I would've realised this, but I actually didn't realise SL was OpenGL based. I guess I really should've mind you, afterall, DirectX isn't available on Mac or Linux is it?

Thanks for your input Bitzer... and thank god I had the foresight to dual boot Vista with XP!

Ya know, from past experiences beta testing Win2000 and XP I've learned Windows betas are a waste of time and advil but I think I'll try being a little bit constructive. Has anyone attempted to use a decent OpenGL-Direct3D wrapper like SciTech GLDirect to get past the lack of OpenGL support?