I just made my windows vista dvd and was wondering what the scoop is on vista beta 2. Is it safe or are there bugs or what? It will have to replace my windows XP that I'm running on so I want to be sure it's not going to stop me from developing. I know nobody can tell me that but perhaps some input on others experience would be nice. Thanks, Devin

I've got it running on a couple of machines and it's fine. But don't take my experiences as a guarantee. It all depends on the hardware and driver support for it.

Vista would not stop you from develop but with the system and the drivers (for D3D9) still in beta it could cause you some headaches. Because of this you should not throw away your XP as already recommend.

May I ask you what you mean with MDX10? In the case you talk about my managed layer for Direct3D 10 the version on mdxinfo is not yet updated to the last Vista version. Microsoft make some changed that requires changes in the layer, too.

Only to make sure everybody get this little detail about Direct3D 10.

There are no Direct3D 10 drivers for current hardware and you will never see such a driver. The Direct3D 10 runtime needs a driver that support a very strict feature set. As none of the current hardware is able to do this there are no Direct3D 10 drivers. You will need new hardware. Additional this mean if you move to Direct3D only you look out anybody with older hardware and Windows XP. There are some strategies to solve this problem. I am currently working on a talk about this. Unfortunately it will be in German which will make even the slides unusable for most of the people here.

I would just like to develop for directx9 at the moment but would like to have support for both dx9 and dx10. I'm not too worried about developing for dx10 at the moment.

[edit]
I guess I should be more in-depth. I've read about some of the enhancements in DX10 and found that it will greatly improve the performance of my functions. Perhaps even a software emulation would improve my performance if made correctly, unsure though. Anyways, I welcome dx10 but like everyone, know that it will be some time before fully supported and used. None-the-less I would like to play around and begin porting gradually.

-Devin

[Edited by - devronious on June 13, 2006 10:24:45 AM]

Curious... which should I install? 32bit version or 64bit version of the Vista OS?

I'm unsure if there is any advantage in the 64bit version?

I installed the 64-bit version, and IMO it was way too unstable. I had it crash three times (intant shutdown, no BSOD or something like that) and I only used it like 30 hours. Many programs couldn't run, most was 32 bit. I was asked all the time if I was sure (almost every time I opened a page in IE it asked if I wanted to allow "IE add-on manager" or something like that), every program, and every connection needed my approval, most programs needed it many times. The performance wasn't that good either, I experienced lag with a single IE window open (AMD64 3200+, 1GB DDR RAM, 6600GT, performance rating: 3). Even MS's own software had problems, MS Office 2007 didn't run correctly most times. MS VS 2005 couldn't even install. I often got "An error occured, have to shut down program". I don't know if there are similar problems with the 32-bit version, but I would recommend to stay away from the 64-bit version. The first time I tried to install it, it crashed while installing, but it had apparently made some changes to my BIOS which resulted in my mouse not working until I resetted the BIOS (removing battery). When I installed Vista after that I corrected the date and time, and then it informed me that my "activation period" had expired, of course I couldn't activite it because the buttons for activitions was broken. I had to re-install Vista after that. Also I destroyed the boot record once because I installed a CD-burning program (don't remember its name, Roxio was the manufacteur I think).

The driver support was impressive, it automatically installed audio driver and network driver, things I previously had to install manually to get to work.

EDIT: You won't increase performance by switching to D3D10, it will be way slower because it's run on the reference device (less than 5 FPS for most games, which normally runs at more than 60 FPS).