Orbiter on windows 7

[SkyBon]

I hope that when I start using W7 there will be no problems for me. BTW what if Orbiter will be optimized for CUDA (GPGPU) usage?

 

[Mandella]

Well, even though the issues with the G meter fixed itself, the combination of poor performance and Orulex's tendency to crash under Vista/Win7 has driven me back to running Orbiter on WinXP for the time being.

Since I'm pretty sure Microsoft isn't going to go back to supporting DirectX 7 anytime soon, so I guess the best thing is to hope that the next Orbiter version is released before Win7 hits the market for real (otherwise I'm just going to have to maintain a legacy machine)...

 

[-Pv-]

It's not like XP users are going to suffer any time soon. It's still the most solid OS MS has so far. Win7 won't capture the market share until the 1st service pack comes out for it. That's going to be a long time yet and still most games will have XP compatibility for a long time after that.
-Pv-

 

[agentgonzo]

Can someone provide a link with information about the DirectX7 emulation? I can't seem to find it much with Google searches.

I was playing around with it yesterday and noticed that most of the slowdown seemed to be in the Planetarium mode and the number of stars that are drawn (presumably because they are drawn with GDI (which is not hardware accelerated) rather than DirectX). I noticed a slowdown of about 10fps when turning on planetarium mode and the number of stars seemed to vastly slow down the fps (from 60 down to 30) when reducing the number of stars.

If I turn the stars and the planetarium mode off then I can still get over 75fps easy.

 

[escapetomsfate]

I've just accidentally lost Windows 7 :S

I was increasing the size of it's partition, and it hung on 64% for about 2 and a half hours, at which point I turned the PC off. Turned it on again, all data gone...

So I've started over with XP, and after installing all drivers etc -

260 FPS in orbiter, simulating a moving ship under time accel. I haven't made any changes to my hardware. And I have a new favourite OS

 

[agentgonzo]

Not sure if it will help, but this XP compatibility thingy sounds like it could help out on the low framerates.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/27/windows_7_xp_mode/

 

[Hielor]

Not sure if it will help, but this XP compatibility thingy sounds like it could help out on the low framerates.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/27/windows_7_xp_mode/

I was thinking about that too, but I don't think it will. The problem is that it's running in a VM, and VM's don't have access to the graphics hardware.

I'll test it when it's opened up to actually be used, though...

 

[eveningsky339]

I'm going to drop Vista like it's hot the instant 7 hits the market.

 

[agentgonzo]

I was thinking about that too, but I don't think it will. The problem is that it's running in a VM, and VM's don't have access to the graphics hardware.

Not strictly true. VMWare fusion can run DirectX applications quite happily. I'm not sure what performance hit it will get. Given this is a MS VM running on another MS OS it may well support graphics hardware. Then again, it may not.

 

[Hielor]

Not strictly true. VMWare fusion can run DirectX applications quite happily. I'm not sure what performance hit it will get. Given this is a MS VM running on another MS OS it may well support graphics hardware. Then again, it may not.

Like I said, I'll give it a go as soon as I have access to the stuff...

 

[Hielor]

The "XP mode" does not have access to the graphics hardware.

 

[agentgonzo]

The "XP mode" does not have access to the graphics hardware.

Bother. I was hoping that it would. Oh well, never mind. I still get a reasonably framerate on normal 7, so it will have to do. I haven't had the time to upgrade to RC1 yet though.

Thanks for letting us know Hielor.