How are the Vista drivers these days?

[bchildsdotcom]

For people with only 2GB of memory you might wanna read this, yes there is a fix for it that you can apply on a per application basis - yuck. Seems that Vista doesn't know where to stop and will crash once it draws on over 2GB of ram. This is the reason alot of games like Stalker were CTD. (http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3044)



Well this is actually not the problem. The 4gb limitation is a limitation for all 32bit processors, and the default behavior for windows xp and vista is to reserve 2gb for the os, which leaves 2gb for any application. Vista doesn't attempt to allocate more than 2gb memory rather returning an out of memory error to the application requesting the allocation and thereby the application generally crashes (unless the developers accounted for this problem ahead of time.)

The reason we are seeing this now is due to the fact that people generally have more ram now and thus the games that are being developed are living on the edge of this 2gb barrier.

[maxpaynez]

Well this is actually not the problem. The 4gb limitation is a limitation for all 32bit processors, and the default behavior for windows xp and vista is to reserve 2gb for the os, which leaves 2gb for any application. Vista doesn't attempt to allocate more than 2gb memory rather returning an out of memory error to the application requesting the allocation and thereby the application generally crashes (unless the developers accounted for this problem ahead of time.)

The reason we are seeing this now is due to the fact that people generally have more ram now and thus the games that are being developed are living on the edge of this 2gb barrier.


yea - I'm running Vista 64 with an E6420 and Stalker will crash due to the app trying to use more than 2GB of ram. When I apply the fix to it, it works fine. Also, this is not a problem in XP. Read the article, they explain the problem with Vista. So regardless it's still a Vista only issue.

[Slammin]

It doesn't really matter what causes the problems... Vista or 3rd party. The bottom line is there is alot of stuff that doesn't work in Vista that works fine in XP. Despite who's to blame, if it's broke in Vista, it's broke because its Vista.


Troll.

Go find something useful to do with your life/time, etc.

Folks running Vista obviously know there are alternatives. Obviously. So what is your dig here?

Really? What drives dudes like you?

"Despite who's to blame, if it's broke in Vista, it's broke because its Vista."

Man, that really says it all.

[maxpaynez]

Troll.

Go find something useful to do with your life/time, etc.

Folks running Vista obviously know there are alternatives. Obviously. So what is your dig here?

Really? What drives dudes like you?

"Despite who's to blame, if it's broke in Vista, it's broke because its Vista."

Man, that really says it all.


You're the Troll - go get a life man. You bring absolutely nothing to the conversation, but "I love vista so screw everyone else." You have no benchmarks, nothing just your lame attitude. Go find another forum for people like you where you can sit around and shine each others asses.

Go back and re-read the thread. I've got benchmarks showing FarCry (directx) and Prey (opengl) performance in XP vs Vista 32 vs Vista 64. Another post with a list of legitimate issues I have with Vista. And what did you bring? A rubber band to a gunfight. Good luck with that and may Darwin select you...

owned:

[SwedX]

Vista runs extremely well now and I will never tuch XP on my gaming comp any more thats for sure.

Vista is a very great OS and now that the drivers are up to the task I really love it so please creep back to you hole your wining little troll.

[delas52]

You're the Troll - go get a life man. You bring absolutely nothing to the conversation, but "I love vista so screw everyone else." You have no benchmarks, nothing just your lame attitude. Go find another forum for people like you where you can sit around and shine each others asses.

Go back and re-read the thread. I've got benchmarks showing FarCry (directx) and Prey (opengl) performance in XP vs Vista 32 vs Vista 64. Another post with a list of legitimate issues I have with Vista. And what did you bring? A rubber band to a gunfight. Good luck with that and may Darwin select you...

owned:

Never self-proclaim that you have owned someone, especially when you really didn't.

So vista is a tech demo and the third party carries no responsibility in updating their own software to a new OS, which will obviously be different (it can't improve on the old one if it's the same thing)?

[bchildsdotcom]

It doesn't really matter what causes the problems... Vista or 3rd party. The bottom line is there is alot of stuff that doesn't work in Vista that works fine in XP. Despite who's to blame, if it's broke in Vista, it's broke because its Vista.

All the fix does is change the game code to tell vista that it can use more than 2gb of ram, in which case since it is still a 32bit app means that the new limit is 4gb (in 64bit vista only).

The reason for the differing behavior between vista and xp as shown in the article is due to the fact that the applications tend to use more ram in vista thereby running into the limit more frequently.. However as also explained in the article the problem is not limited only to vista, it is merely more likely to be exposed to to the increased memory usage (apparently due to the new graphics layer or something similar).