Windows 7 and IL2... No love?

[Codex]

Originally Posted by mazex

Mmm, the thing that worries me a bit though is that Vista has performed miserably in OGL and Vista 1.1 (Windows 7) seems to continue that tradition. The only modern "in engine" clip of SoW we have seen lately (the editor") was running in OpenGL...

A problem? Hope not... SoW will probably have DirectX support as well, lets just hope that it's not as bad as the dx mode in IL2 in that case. I don't really understand why to bother doing both OpenGL and dx if you only release the game on the Windows platform though...

Anyway - it's the first public beta and it's so much better than Vista was 12 months before release...

It's not OpenGL that is the issue, it's running IL-2 on a modern Windows OS that has a completely different way of displaying dots on the screen than XP. Under XP OpenGL, DX and the GDI existed side by side and all on top of the NT Kernal which meant function calls made via any one of the APIs could directly access the hardware.

With Vista and future versions of Windows, all OpenGL graphical function calls are now made through a couple more layers before getting to the hardware, where DX function calls go straight through to the hardware.





While you may say this means is OpenGL is slower, I would argue only very slightly. The real reason IL-2 is slower on Vista than XP is that it doesn't make use of the new WDDM. As DX10 games basically have unhindered access system memory, CPU and GPU resources, where older games have to share with other apps.