Conflict with Windows Vista Dreamscene Desktop

Rebus · Post by **Rebus** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 1:35 pm

Well this isn't a major issue but something I think you should probably be aware of.

I am not entirely sure of what Dreamscene effects are applied to Windows Vista Ultimate but I downloaded the Dreamscene update and noticed it was possible to have an animated desktop background afterwards. When I run WMP with G-Force Platinum at the same time as having the Dreamscene animated desktop working, G-Force has a major slow down in generating it's patterns. It's clearly conflicting with the desktop animation as when I pause the desktop animation, G-Force springs back into proper operation.

This is happening on the following system:

Dell Inspiron M1710
Intel Core Duo T7400 @ 2.16 GHz
2 GB 667 MHz RAM
nVidia Ge-Force 7900 GTX 512 MB
SigmaTel STAC 92xx Audio
Windows Vista Ultimate
(all latest drivers loaded)

Anyway, while I'm here. Thanks for the work you've put into this awesome piece of software. Everyone who sees my PC asks what the pattern generator on it is.

markofkane · Post by **markofkane** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 2:47 pm

My guess is that Dreamscene is using a lot of the CPU, so that's why G-Force slows down. Check your task manager (I guess Vista has that)

Rebus · Post by **Rebus** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 2:56 pm

Well yeh Vista has a nearly identical Task Manager to XP with the addition of a Users tab. I have also loaded some Desktop Gadgets to monitor CPU / RAM usage in realtime so I know for a fact that CPU usage wasn't the problem.

I can run multiple 3D DirectX 9.0 games in window mode on this laptop. It copes with 2 World of Warcraft instances or 3 EVE Online instances in window mode (fans get to work though). So frankly, 2 seperate 2D animations shouldn't be causing issues.

After reporting this, I had a serious crash in the nVidia graphics driver which wanted to debug in C++. Now I have loaded the latest release of the nVidia driver supplied from Dell (reported as version 7.15.10.9746).

Knowing Dell they like to pick a driver version and mod it to their PCs, then rarely bother with new releases. This driver date is 07-Dec-2006, which I highly doubt is the latest available but the latest Dell tested / modded on Vista.

I'll look into trying to load the latest driver available from nVidia to see if the problem persists and report back when I get time (spent almost 48 hours loading and patching software on top of Vista so far

).

I will also test the Screensaver performance with Dreamscene animated desktop to see if it has a similar issue or whether it is only inside WMP 11.