Vista upgrade 'preparation'

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2007-03-12 09:06am

Is it multiplayer only? I played a long campaign map last night (UEF, the one where you have to defend the research plants, and can then 'choose' to blow up all the enemy bases) and ram usage increased steadily up till 500k, at which point it leveled off. I checked the pagefile once, and I think it was at 600meg, nowhere near full. CPU usage was at max, of course.

Your system doesn't appear to be significantly better than mine, however.
x2 3800+, 2gigs of ram (mismatched and not running at 1t), and a 7800gt.
I'll give multiplayer a try tonight.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-03-12 09:16am

I've never in my life played the single player, but I'm not sure if that's important?

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2007-03-12 10:16pm

Stark wrote:I initially thought it was number of units that caused a game to get slower and slower until a crash, but I confirmed the 'small map, few units, long game' performance problem. Apparently, it's made worse if you use the 'shift' waypoint display overlay, for some reason. I haven't worked out a method to test that, but I can start a game, box up the AI in a corner of 5x5 map and go away, and it'll crash in 30-40 minutes. The GPG forums have many others (with far better systems than my AMD64/6600GT/2gb system) who have the same experience.

I did a little testing, this isn't my problem. After so many units on the field, maybe 800-1000, if I kill off a fair number, the lag goes away. Additionally I'm not seeing my ram usage get ove 500k and the pagefile hasn't gone beyond 700megs.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-03-12 10:27pm

Yeah with the problem others are experiencing, even once most units are gone the lag persists. A friend of mine has a similar system to you - I'll try and slap SupCom on there and see if a liberal nuking makes the lag go away.

Is there a way to see an onscreen count of units/entities in the game? On a 20x20 map, by lategame almost the whole map is flattened but I've got problems that don't go away.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2007-03-12 10:38pm

There is a button which tells you about your limit (though I forget which one...), dunno how to get the map's total number.

Glocksman · Post by **Glocksman** » 2007-03-16 12:11am

Darth Wong wrote:Upgrading from XP to Vista seems like such an utterly pointless thing to do. Do you really expect your day-to-day computing experience to be improved so much that it's worth the hassle and expense?

For me, the only expense was the $10.60 I got charged by Dell for their 'Express Upgrade' from XP Pro to Vista Business on my D820 laptop.
As far as hassle goes, it *is* time consuming to reinstall all of my apps and shift mental gears to the Vista UI after years of 98/2k/XP use (UAC is annoying until you get everything reinstalled and some of the most common things aren't where they used to be).

Objectively, was it worth it? Probably not at this stage.
However, I love to tinker with stuff so I'm not that put out by the time factor and $10.60 wasn't that much money.
Besides I took the sensible precaution of using Acronis True Image 10 to make a full backup of my laptop's hard drive with XP and installed apps to my desktop system (I

network backup/restore) before futzing around with Vista.

WRT any upgrade hassles, I had no problems with my D820 even though I didn't use the upgrade assistant DVD and just performed a clean install after formatting the hard drive with the Vista upgrade disc.
The only drivers I installed after making an Acronis image of the bare OS right after running winupdate were the latest nvidia driver for the quadro 120 video card, Dell bluetooth driver, and the intel chipset inf driver.
The only hardware that I don't have a driver for right is the 'biometric coprocessor' fingerprint reader for the security minded that I never used anyway, so it's not a huge issue.

My upgrade kit arrived today, so I'm still in the middle of putting Humpty - Dumpty back together, but here's a screencap of it installed.

Mange · Post by **Mange** » 2007-03-16 01:07am

My advice is that you wait before the first issues have been ironed out.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2007-03-16 01:34am

Mange wrote:My advice is that you wait before the first issues have been ironed out.

What issues? No one has mentioned issues other than the 'do a clean install', which I'm more or less okay with.

Resinence · Post by **Resinence** » 2007-03-16 01:39am

InnocentBystander wrote:
Mange wrote:My advice is that you wait before the first issues have been ironed out.
What issues? No one has mentioned issues other than the 'do a clean install', which I'm more or less okay with.

Performance has greatly improved over the beta builds, but there is still MANY compatibility issues, even with newer software.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2007-03-16 01:43am

As long as I can still ssh into the school bsd machines with putty or the like and play Supreme Commander, Company of Heroes, and the various Steam based games I enjoy, I'm okay. Anything else I can run on my laptop which will continue to run XP.

graphics drivers still support dual monitors... right?

Netko · Post by **Netko** » 2007-03-16 04:25am

Yes.

The things currently supported unperfectly are OpenGL on the ATi side (performance only, stability is top notch), SLI on the nVidia side (and maybe some other issues, I don't follow nVidia that closely since I don't have any of their cards in my computers).

As far as compatibility goes, yes, for some things you have to do a little work with workarounds, but most of those come down to running the install with admin privileges and checking XPSP2 compatibility on the compatibility tab - once you do it once, you know how to do it more if it is necessary, other then that I've yet to run into an app that doesn't work that isn't a low level system utility (for example, the app for setting up my touchpad - no matter, the defaults are more then satisfactory).

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2007-03-16 03:06pm

Company of Heroes has a known crash during the campaign, which will be addressed in the next patch (may have already been patched - I haven't played in a while). I do know that the skirmish maps work.

Supreme Commander runs great.

As far as Steam based games go, I know HL2 and Lost Coast have worked from day one, and I know that the Steam versions of X3 runs fine (I tried to install the rolling demo, and Vista blocked Starfarce! ha!). I'd bet much of the rest of the Steam catalog has since been updated.

Nvidia's drivers *should* support dual monitor (I don't have a second monitor at home, so I can't verify). For the most part, everything runs fine. I do have two problems that I think are related to Nvidia's drivers; BF2142 likes to BSOD when entering the enemy's Titan and sometimes when loading a new (large) map, and Oblivion locks up when loading exterior cells (but I can still get to task manager to kill it). The 101.41 drivers suck ass, so use something from before. A new Nvidia beta driver is due next week. Between the new drivers, the next Oblivion patch (due sometime this month) and the next BF patch, I expect all these problems to be solved shortly.

As for SLI. It functions. I won't say its working until it runs faster than a single card.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2007-03-16 03:16pm

I've finished the CoH campaign, and as long as multi/skrimish still work I'm happy.

Well I'll be running my 7800gt until Crysis comes out I think, so SLI and the new dx10 graphics card problems shouldn't be too much of a problem. I won't get a chance to order it (need to get my hands on a scanner) for a week or two anyway. Oh, and I don't play bf2142.

Any problems with Unreal 2k4 based games? I do enjoy Red Orchestra. Theres also Space Empires V, but if that doesn't work its no big deal, it runs fine on my laptop.

Does office 2k3 still work? I can get the new version from school no problem, but I kinda perfer 2k3.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2007-03-16 03:32pm

Office 2003 works fine. I use Outlook everyday on Vista, and Word and Powerpoint haven't given me any shit.

I haven't heard any bitching about UT2K4 and like, other than a bug that exists solely with the G80s (and is present in XP as well), so I'd guess those games are fine.