Vista versus my Unity games

Unity Engine
1

I don’t have direct access to a Windows Vista machine yet but I know two people who do. In both cases my two Unity games (Pawns; A Tack!) run very badly. One game is playable but the lighting is absolutely flat, no glossy highlights. In the other game the spotlight is entirely missing, and there may be texture problems as well (it’s too dark to make out clearly.)

Is this because graphics card manufacturers haven’t released OpenGL drivers for Vista yet? One of the PCs was upgraded to Vista, but the other was a brand new machine from Dell with Vista pre-installed, ATI X1300 video card. I had some hopes that the second one at least would have drivers.

(I did attempt to rebuild both games using Unity 1.6.1 but my testers reported no joy.)

Thanks for any info.

2

All reports I’ve heard is that Vista drivers are very early in development still and are generally horrid across the board. Vista will be fairly bad for gaming for a little while yet…

3

Do those users even have video drivers installed? It’s the same situation as with Windows XP - the default fresh install does not have OpenGL drivers.

If they’d check Data\output_log.txt, at the top there is driver type printed. If it’s Microsoft Generic, that means they don’t have the drivers.

4

I agree that it’s almost certainly a driver issue for the cards. A co-worker has experienced similar OpenGL problems in Vista with a number of things.

5

Thanks for the replies.

I’d forgotten that about XP. Maybe I was just lucky, but I don’t know anyone who tried my Windows builds who didn’t already have reasonable OpenGL drivers installed without knowing how.

In the case of my testers, one of these machines was brand new with a factory-install of Vista! I have found no indication that ATi or nVidia has even released Vista OpenGL drivers yet, fresh install or no.

It’s still early for Vista, granted, but this is potentially a major roadblock. For example, think about Freeverse, who have a tough decision to make about when to ship Big Bang Brain Games for Windows… And could Shockwave take an OpenGL-based game under current circumstances? Etc.)

Thanks for that tip. I’ll have them check, but I’d say it’s almost certainly the generic driver, given how identically the two machines behaved.

Thankfully for me I’m just distributing some free games I wrote, so I’ll just update my docs with the bad news and continue along my merry way. Hopefully things will improve though- it’s better for Unity if this issue goes away.

6

Well, people had 6 years to do that by now :slight_smile:

ATI has drivers here and NVIDIA has them here.