[globaldonkey]

OK, I've gone to the darkside and I'm trying an installation of MP on Vista Ultimate.

First thing I noticed in the installation process was that the MP installer wanted to downgrade DirectX 10 to Direct X9c. I didn't build the base OS on this system, but is DX10 "normal" on Vista? Is it normal for MP to want to backlevel this?

Post installation, I ran DX diag, and it reports I am still running DX 10. I suspect DX may be the root of the following problem:

Now the problem..... MP runs flawlessly in window mode. But if I go to fullscreen mode, as I switch around a few menus, the GUI eventually becomes corrupted (usually all the text disappears), and eventually MP locks up and won't even respond to ALT-F4. Using Blue3wide.

Also, I noticed some tearing in video playback. I was using EVR, so I enabled Aero. The problem got much worse.

Logs don't seem to show anything abnormal. Any clues?

[happy]

what drivers are you using for your ATi card?
MP needs some files some DX9 so installing it is fine

[Paranoid Delusion]

That sound like the video driver, did windows install it, or did you install manually.

A couple of things I found running Vista Ultimate, unless I used the full admin account, kept finding drivers would get uninstalled\corrupted , these have been fine since switching account, believe me I have tried lots of times to get this to work with a "normal" user admin account" and within a few days had problems return, of course this could just be my hardware, and it was mainly drivers relating to Creative\Nvidia audio\Video which were the culprits.
Make your Vista's admin account acts like in XP - Neowin Forums

Also scheduled tasks would fail, again the workaround is make sure you use the full admin with password protection, there are still ways to avoid putting the password in on login, the details are in this post automatic account logon vista, automatically logic to user in vista, select default account to log on in vista, logon automatically with default selected user account, » Triponic.

Above may stop you having the same frustration as I did, as to why some things did not work as they should with Vista.

[Owlsroost]

Originally Posted by globaldonkey

OK, I've gone to the darkside and I'm trying an installation of MP on Vista Ultimate.

First thing I noticed in the installation process was that the MP installer wanted to downgrade DirectX 10 to Direct X9c. I didn't build the base OS on this system, but is DX10 "normal" on Vista? Is it normal for MP to want to backlevel this?

Yes, DX10 is normal on Vista, but MP uses DX9 and needs the latest DX9 libraries installed. DX10 and DX9 run alongside each other - DX10 doesn't replace DX9. Windows 7 is DX11...

Post installation, I ran DX diag, and it reports I am still running DX 10. I suspect DX may be the root of the following problem:

Now the problem..... MP runs flawlessly in window mode. But if I go to fullscreen mode, as I switch around a few menus, the GUI eventually becomes corrupted (usually all the text disappears), and eventually MP locks up and won't even respond to ALT-F4. Using Blue3wide.

Also, I noticed some tearing in video playback. I was using EVR, so I enabled Aero. The problem got much worse.

Logs don't seem to show anything abnormal. Any clues?

I'd make sure that Vista is fully updated via Windows Update first, and run the MP installer with Admin rights (right click and select 'Run as Administrator') just to be on the safe side.

Is this the same hardware as in your system specs ?

Tony

[globaldonkey]

Thanks very much for the responses everyone..... this gives me some clues and things to try. And thanks for the re-assurance that DX9 + DX10 is ok. Ruling that out - yes I agree the video drivers look like the culprit.

The system specs in my profile are my existing system, so sorry for the confusion there. This a new system I'm messing with. It's the ASUS M3N78-VM, with the Nvidia Chipset (8200 onboard GPU). I updated with the latest chipset drivers from ASUS. Very confusing when you search for this board on ASUSTek, as the latest driver version seems to V15.24 (which I installed), but a week before that the version was 18.12. Go figure.

I did run Windows update, and it did think there were later video drivers. I just never trust Microsoft when it comes to drivers

So I've got 3 options I think. Trust Microsoft and update with whatever version they want to install (they don't tell you, hence the mis-trust), go to this 18.12 version from ASUS (which seems to be back level) or go to Nvidia and install 8200 drivers from them. Any recommendations which way I should go?


...and I'll look into this admin rights stuff too.


EDIT: Took a punt and trusted MS. It updated the display driver from 7.15.11.7540 to 7.15.11.8250 and everything is sweet. Enabled aero and EVR, no tearing, all is good. Thanks again guys. This community rocks!