I just bought an nvidia card

[nanonyme]

BTW thank you for providing a example of ATI's incompetence of keeping their driver current for the worlds largest adopted OS. If there is a lack of a driver on Win it's not MS's fault, that blame falls solely on the hardware manufacturer.

Yeah, aren't they going even so far as to saying that Windows is a highly stable OS on top of which highly unstable 3rd party programs (and drivers) are ran and that's why you get a crashy experience. (might possibly even be true)

[deanjo]

Thanks for reminding me why I've put you on my ignore list.

Most people that live in a world of munchkins, unicorns, and smurfs do. I tend to insert reality into their world.

[BlackStar]

BTW thank you for providing a example of ATI's incompetence of keeping their driver current for the worlds largest adopted OS. If there is a lack of a driver on Win it's not MS's fault, that blame falls solely on the hardware manufacturer.

Thanks for reminding me why I've put you on my ignore list.

[kraftman]

In win land it's called windows update.

Last time I used Windows provided drivers I didn't have OpenGL support. Dx was working.

My sister on her mac enjoys full 3d without having to download a damn thing.

Exactly the same here (except driver isn't mature yet), but on Linux and Ati card :>

If there is a lack of a driver on Win it's not MS's fault, that blame falls solely on the hardware manufacturer

The same about Linux, OS X, Solaris, BSD, but OS devs can fill those gaps and Linux is an excellent example here.

[mirv]

In case you didn't know, ati release monthly drivers for windows too. That keeps them fairly current.

[deanjo]

BTW thank you for providing a example of ATI's incompetence of keeping their driver current for the worlds largest adopted OS. If there is a lack of a driver on Win it's not MS's fault, that blame falls solely on the hardware manufacturer.

[deanjo]

A couple of months ago, I installed Vista for a friend. Windows update helpfully installed a driver for his 4850HD, which didn't even support the card (immediate blue screen). It then kept overwriting the correct driver on startup.

For the record, Jaunty installed and ran perfectly on the very same system, without configuring a single damn driver.

Well if we are going to use single instances as proof, my ten year old installed Win 7 RC and it immediately had fully featured drivers.

My senior citizen father also can install Windows XP and have 3d drivers installed via win update and for his uses it works perfectly fine. He can even run games.

My sister on her mac enjoys full 3d without having to download a damn thing.

Seriously, much like windows users like to bring up old outdated arguments against linux, the linux users do the EXACT same thing against other OS's.

[BlackStar]

For most people they work fine. Gamers will know to update, but for 95% of the users the "outdated" drivers work perfectly fine for what they want to do on their computers.

A couple of months ago, I installed Vista for a friend. Windows update helpfully installed a driver for his 4850HD, which didn't even support the card (immediate blue screen). It then kept overwriting the correct driver on startup.

For the record, Jaunty installed and ran perfectly on the very same system, without configuring a single damn driver.

@Milyardo: it is true that Ati drivers tend to be more strict when enforcing the OpenGL specs. Unfortunately, their OpenGL implementation tends to be more buggy than Nvidia's (for example, FBO blits of multisampled depth renderbuffers have been broken for more than a year!)

You really need to test on both kinds of hardware while developing, if you wish to maintain any semblance of compatibility. If you actually need to support Intel hardware too... you are in for a world of pain.

Truth be told, there's a good reason why OpenGL is marginalized. OpenGL has two things going for it: cross-platform support and VR extensions. The API itself is ugly, inconsistent, inefficient (sampler state is still part of the texture object state) and downright awful at places (recompiling shaders every time you run your program!) Not to mention the god-awful driver support for anything more complex than spinning cubes.

I've lived and breathed OpenGL during the past three years; I've edited the specs directly; reported 15-year old bugs to Khronos; logged driver with issues Intel, Amd and Nvidia; I've implemented two different OpenGL bindings, plus a freaking 300Kloc platform abstraction to bring GL/ES/AL/CL to Mono/.Net.

I've invested so much time and energy that it physically hurts to admit that OpenGL is on the brink of death. Direct3D is a much better API, easier to use, more efficient and faster evolving. XNA is so simple that even the scientific community is jumping ship. Hell, even OpenGL ES is better - I'd use it in an instant if it existed on the desktop!

But we don't really have a choice: if you care for non-Windows support, OpenGL is the only way. Considering the odds, most developers simply don't bother anymore.

[curaga]

Video drivers on Windows update are horribly outdated and come without OpenGL support. I pity the poor devils that use windows update to get their video drivers.

Agreed. On more than one occasion, right after installing the latest Nvidia driver manually, Windows Update has proposed a driver from 2005 as an update to it. If an user doesn't notice that and presses go, it actually degrades the experience.

[deanjo]

Video drivers on Windows update are horribly outdated and come without OpenGL support. I pity the poor devils that use windows update to get their video drivers.

For most people they work fine. Gamers will know to update, but for 95% of the users the "outdated" drivers work perfectly fine for what they want to do on their computers.