Re: Starting Existing VB6 Project in Vista

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"Steve Easton" <admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:uWgOHBwSIHA.748@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

[Mike Williams said] Vista totally disables all 2D hardware
acceleration on my [ATI Radeon 9600] video card, resulting
in lots of my 2D drawing code running up to ten times slower
on this Vista machine that they do on exactly the same machine
if I install XP onto it!

[Steve Easton said] NVIDIA seems to have it figured out.
At least on my machine.

Really? I hope it's true, because if Nvidia have persuaded Microsoft to allow their drivers to run properly then perhaps ATI will do the same pretty soon (although of course Microsoft go to bed with Intel and so anything produced by Intel's rival AMD (including ATI) will not be high on Microsoft's list of priorities!

Have you actually checked this stuff by the way, Steve? Does your Nvidia 2D hardware acceleration really run okay on Vista?

Perhaps you would like to try the following test for me (or perhaps anyone else using an Nvidia card or in fact any other accelerated card on Vista might like to try it out). The test code sets up two 1024 x 768 pixel screen compatible memory bitmaps and it blits one to the other 1000 times. The code produces and displays two separate timings in a message box. The first is the time that the VB code takes to actually finish executing (when it has sent the blits to the accelerated 2D hardware queue, at which point the main processor is immediately free for use for any other non 'graphical on a different DC task', such as game logic, analysis, sorting, data handling, math processes, etc, etc). The second is the time taken for all 1000 blits to actually finish being . . . erm . . . blitted, whether they are carried out by accelerated harware or not. On my own fairly old AMD 3000+ machine with a Radeon 9600 Pro graphics card I get the following results:

Time to free processor Time for blits to actually finish

Vista 7840 milliseconds 7842 milliseconds
XP 1 milliseond 1543 milliseconds

As you'll see from the above figures, 2D hardware acceleration is not working at all in Vista, as is evidenced by the fact that both figures are more or less the same at about 7840 milliseconds. However, on the exact same system when running XP the processor is free for use (the blits have been sent to the hardware queue) after just 1 millisecond (which is very fast, but is exactly what you would expect using an accelerated video card) and the time for the actual blits to finish completing (the time that the video card takes to complete them) is about five times faster than on Vista, so on both counts XP is winning hands down. I do of course realise that modern processors are very much faster than my old AMD 3000+ and so the video card hardware time (if acceleration is working) might be a lot closer to the main processor software time on more modern machines, but I would be very interested in seeing your results (and, of course, the full details of the Vista system on which you obtained those results). Your results will enable me to tell for sure whether or not your video card 2D hardware acceleration is working on your Vista machine.

Anyway, here's the test code. Paste it into a VB Form containing one Command Button and two Picture Boxes. I really would appreciate it if you would try this code for me and let me know what you get on your own system.

Mike

p.s. I really would appreciate it if anyone else here would perform the test for me as well and post their results, including details of the hardware on which it was achieved (XP or Vista, main processor, video card).

Here you go Mike:

Processor free at 801Ms and bits completed at 802Ms

Windows XP Pro SP2 with all updates
AMD Athlon XP 2800+, 2.10Ghz and 1.5Gb RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS with 512Mb of RAM

Sorry, I don't have Vista as it doesn't play well on my older computers.

GP
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