Windows 7

[Von Paulus 8]

I've installed OFF in Windows 7 Home Premium (32). No problemn to report (as expected).

Only two things that must be tweaked. The regional settings for the non-english Windows and I had to install Directx 9.

The gaming is running very smooth.

As for the Windows 7 itself, yes, I do believe that MS has a winner this time.

[Siggi 10]

I've installed OFF in Windows 7 Home Premium (32). No problemn to report (as expected).

Only two things that must be tweaked. The regional settings for the non-english Windows and I had to install Directx 9.

The gaming is running very smooth.

As for the Windows 7 itself, yes, I do believe that MS has a winner this time.

 

What graphics-drivers are you using?

[Von Paulus 8]

What graphics-drivers are you using?

ATI Catalyst drivers 9.10 with ATITool. I've a 4890.

With the last versions of Catalyst drivers I have stutters in XP and decrease of performance in OFF. But curiously it didn't happen with ARMA II. I've the same performance in XP and Win7. Well this is the wonderful world of PC gaming.

Have you checked your PSU? Do you've enough amp for the 285?

[Siggi 10]

ATI Catalyst drivers 9.10 with ATITool. I've a 4890.

With the last versions of Catalyst drivers I have stutters in XP and decrease of performance in OFF. But curiously it didn't happen with ARMA II. I've the same performance in XP and Win7. Well this is the wonderful world of PC gaming.

Have you checked your PSU? Do you've enough amp for the 285?

 

Ya, I have a Corsair 625w with dedicated rails thingy.

[CaptSopwith 18]

Hehe, I remember when XP came out. It totally, completely sucked for the 1st 6-12 months. Maybe those of you all who love XP so much today have forgotten that .

 

It's always the same when a new OS comes out..

 

 

I'll chime in since I'm running Windows 7 Professional. So far my copy of OFF has run fine. I noticed some minor FPS drop, but I think that's more to do with the very buggy 191 series of nvidia drivers more than any OS problem.

 

I quoted you Bullethead because I remember having this very same argument when XP came out. All of the die hard Red Baron II pilots - myself included - opted to stick with Windows 98 for years after XP came out simply because RBII would not run in XP. Everyone said "oh well, the game crashes... the graphics drivers are crap... if you can get it to run it doesn't play well... etc." At the time I was playing RB on my parent's computer (after all I was 16), and we had the option to upgrade our aging Dell PC to a newer model with XP. I turned the offer down, simply because I didn't want to lose RB. In the end, I was stuck with a dinosaur of a PC (which I used right up until I got my new gateway last year) and guess what? About six months after I declined a brand new PC, the RB folks figured out how to get it working in XP.

 

Aside from that little tangent. Win7 has been a pretty easy upgrade process. I've had some niggling issues with drivers in regards to my games (but again, this can mostly be attributed to 191.xx being a pretty terrible set of drivers) but otherwise, everything that worked in Vista works in 7. The other nice improvement, besides the interface, is that Win7 eats up less RAM (my system measurements show only a quarter of my 3Gb of ram being used now compared to nearly half under Vista) and this tends to give me a bit better performance in my games. So far so good I say.

 

The old adage is that every other Microsoft OS is a good one. I think it still holds true with seven.

 

Just my 2cents. Your mileage may vary. Also, I'm an SP flier only in OFF, so I have no idea how MP works in 7.

 

BTW: I'm still here lurking on the forums - but I'm up to my eyeballs in research here in grad school. I hope all is well with my fellow pilots here on the boards.

Edited October 27, 2009 by _CaptSopwith

[Von Paulus 8]

Ya, I have a Corsair 625w with dedicated rails thingy.

1 Hardisk? Is it defraged?

[Siggi 10]

1 Hardisk? Is it defraged?

 

Three hard-drives (all defragged every week). Total rated power-consumption of the entire rig at full-bore is around 450w, which might be an issue with a single-rail non-modular PSU, but mine has all the necessary wotsits in that regard. It previously ran two GTX8800s in SLI mode without any problems, which consumed considerably more power and I had no power issues there either.

[Von Paulus 8]

Three hard-drives (all defragged every week). Total rated power-consumption of the entire rig at full-bore is around 450w, which might be an issue with a single-rail non-modular PSU, but mine has all the necessary wotsits in that regard. It previously ran two GTX8800s in SLI mode without any problems, which consumed considerably more power and I had no power issues there either.

Fully agree. Corsair is one of the best PSU's that money can buy.

I have 3 hardisks also. I use 1 for Windows, other for the games and other for pagefile and storing. I keep pagefile separated to have better performance. I never measured the use of pagefile in OFF it could be interesting to know.

Maybe your problem is related to nvidia drivers. A lot of people seems to be complaining with the last versions.

[Siggi 10]

Fully agree. Corsair is one of the best PSU's that money can buy.

I have 3 hardisks also. I use 1 for Windows, other for the games and other for pagefile and storing. I keep pagefile separated to have better performance. I never measured the use of pagefile in OFF it could be interesting to know.

Maybe your problem is related to nvidia drivers. A lot of people seems to be complaining with the last versions.

 

Yes, and I wish I'd never loaded them. After all these years of practice and experience NVidia still manage to produce shonky drivers on an alarmingly regular basis. I've had mine stop and recover twice this morning, and all I was doing was working in Photoshop.

 

I'll grin and bear it though and hope some better ones are offered soon.

[Von Paulus 8]

I've always had the impression that ATI designed better hardware but the software team in Nvidia was better.

Let's see what will happen with the arrival of Intel to the graphic card market.

[Bullethead 12]

I for one haven't forgotten that..and in fact, it continued to suck right up until the release of SP2

But Vista sucked when it came out...continues to Suck..and (IMHO) will continue to suck for ever more!..Hence the arrival of W7 is welcomed...Just installed it on a Clients Laptop (overwriting Vista) and touch wood...looking very good indeed!..didnt have to search for drivers at all!!...brilliant

 

I pretty much agree, although I have a different opinion of Vista. Vista started out quite well for me out of the box and I've never had any problems with it. What's happened, however, is that all the patches for Vista to fix other people's (probably self-inflicted) problems have turned it into bloatware, so that Vista now runs about 1/2 as fast as it did originally, and is also less stable due to hogging more resources and different parts of the bloatware arguing over which owns what piece of memory. As a result, I'm now pretty tired of Vista and am also eagerly anticipating Win7.

 

As I understand things, Vista was never intended originally for public release. It was like MS's test environment to develop features for future OS releases. However, once Gates took himself out of the loop, those left in charge saw the opportunity for a quick profit and released it as the new standard, and the rest is history. Win7, OTOH, was built for the public.

 

I expect Win7 to be better than Vista in the long run, and probably better than XP SP2. However, I don't expect that immediately. So, what I'm going to do is install it on 1 of my soon-to-be 3 computers and let that one go through the growing pains. Once I find that acceptable, I'll put it on the others.

[Boelcke 0]

Looks like I'm stuffed. Zero FFB in OFF (including no spring-pretension whatsoever, which leaves the stick flopping about and useless) and in CFS3 it's either zero or the stick pulls fully back and stays there. I've installed the Saitek drivers "Vista & Windows 7" for both the stick and rudders, tried setting them in compatibility mode for "older programs" (in the Saitek properties window), calibrated them both in and out of the game, no joy (stick...har har). I get no throttle in OFF either (works in CFS3).

 

Anyone have any ideas, or is this a W7 thing? My stick is a Cyborg Force 3D by the way.

 

I´m using a Saitek Evo Force with Win 7 and do have a similar problem - the stick works, but the force feedback feature is gone. In Saiteks own Forum i saw that some people did had the same problem with Vista in the past, but the described registry tweaks to solve that problem didn´t work for me. The old Vista drivers are now shown as "Vista and Windows 7" drivers, so that there is little hope the problem will be solved in the near future.

[Von Paulus 8]

Hehe, I remember when XP came out. It totally, completely sucked for the 1st 6-12 months. Maybe those of you all who love XP so much today have forgotten that .

 

It's always the same when a new OS comes out. The OS itself will have a number of bugs and few if any of the drivers intended for it will actually work well or at all. It thus always takes at least 6 months, often more, to get these problems sorted out. The early-adopters have all kinds of problems and a generally rotten time, but their sacrfices are what get the problems solved for those who wait.

 

So, I salute all you early-adopters with Win7, and look forward to getting a good OS with good drivers sometime next year, about when I get a new computer. I drink to your bravery in exploring this new environment

 

 

 

That is true. But I think Win 7, at least the 32 bit version, is far more stable than XP at launch. Of course this things are also hardware related. Memory and processor are important in terms of performance.

IMO this can be easily explained. XP was a major breakthrough when it was released (compared with Millenium and 2000). So some adaptations were needed. Windows 7 it's more a natural kind of evolution from XP and Vista.

While with Vista I've a hate relationship, with this I'm beginning to fall in love. So far.

[CaptSopwith 18]

I need to learn W7 for my work, but it just so happened that the day before W7 arrived I started to get multiple crashes in at least three games with the dreaded "nv4_disp" error. That was after I'd been trying lots of different drivers with my new GTX285, and it had clearly corrupted the OS.

 

I am getting minor jerks and stutters with OFF in W7, despite very high FPS, something that didn't happen under XP with a lesser card (GTX8800), but it's not a show-stopper, just irritating.

 

 

Hey Siggi, I finally got around to some more involved flying with OFF this evening and I'm noticing the same random hic-up jerkiness and stutters you mentioned. I'm using the GT8800 card with this W7 rig and while the frame rate is nearly as high as it was under Vista, the random stutter is irritating.

 

What set of drivers are you using? I rolled back to the pre 191.xx drivers after the latest set fubared some older games I had in the collection.

 

 

[Siggi 10]

Hey Siggi, I finally got around to some more involved flying with OFF this evening and I'm noticing the same random hic-up jerkiness and stutters you mentioned. I'm using the GT8800 card with this W7 rig and while the frame rate is nearly as high as it was under Vista, the random stutter is irritating.

 

What set of drivers are you using? I rolled back to the pre 191.xx drivers after the latest set fubared some older games I had in the collection.

 

I'm using the latest, the 191.07s. I'm a bit leery of going back to anything earlier in case it makes things worse.

[CaptSopwith 18]

I'm using the latest, the 191.07s. I'm a bit leery of going back to anything earlier in case it makes things worse.

 

I was using that series of driver as well. I have a large game library on my PC, including some older titles like the original Call of Duty. For some reason the newest set of drivers breaks that game, causing a "Buffer Overrun" error when starting. So I rolled the drivers back one generation and the problem cleared up. I can't understand how these driver programmers can improve performance on some games and completely break others, it makes no sense.

 

I hope the next set will improve the random stutter. My performance seems pretty decent - slightly lower fps than under Vista, it's just the damn stutter that's pretty irritating. Any ideas of what else we could try to improve it?

[Von Paulus 8]

I can't understand how these driver programmers can improve performance on some games and completely break others, it makes no sense.

I thinks it's unavoidable. Besides that, at a certain stage they begun to optimize more for the new cards, the new operative systems and for the games with more sales.

 

I hope the next set will improve the random stutter. My performance seems pretty decent - slightly lower fps than under Vista, it's just the damn stutter that's pretty irritating. Any ideas of what else we could try to improve it?

Have you tweaked the graphic settings like it is explained in the FAQ?

If you are at easy with more technical stuff, I'd say take a look at this guide: http://www.tweakguides.com/NVFORCE_1.html

Tweaking options like 'Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames' have helped people in the past (with different games).

You can try to run the game with the optin Windows XP compatibility mode (but I doubt that will change anything).

[CaptSopwith 18]

I thinks it's unavoidable. Besides that, at a certain stage they begun to optimize more for the new cards, the new operative systems and for the games with more sales.

 

 

Have you tweaked the graphic settings like it is explained in the FAQ?

If you are at easy with more technical stuff, I'd say take a look at this guide: http://www.tweakguid.../NVFORCE_1.html

Tweaking options like 'Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames' have helped people in the past (with different games).

You can try to run the game with the optin Windows XP compatibility mode (but I doubt that will change anything).

 

Thanks for the feedback Von Paulus. I think I'll give some of those ideas a shot this morning. I set up my graphics and nvidia settings based on some settings posted here a while back and it worked great under Vista. As of right now, my card pre-renders 3 frames, so I'll try increasing it and see if that helps. If not, then I'll try XP mode just to see. Thankfully I have a free morning before I have to teach a class at noon, so I'll brew some coffee and do some trouble shooting.

 

Thanks again! I'll post back with some results when I get them.

 

 

---Ten Minutes Later---

 

Von Paulus, if I could give you a medal sir, I would! Turning up the pre-rendered frames from 3 to 6 seems to have solved my problem! There is no detectable stutter, and this was flying a quick scenario 20v20 Fok D7's vs SE5's. I'll need to playtest a few more missions to be sure, but so far it's looking promising (knock on wood). If this permenately fixes my problem, I'll give Windows 7 an A+

 

Another fun part of Win7 that I enjoy are the themes, which allow you to create slide shows. I was able to shamelessly save the pictures under the screenshots thread here on the boards and created an OFF theme that rotates screenshots every ten minutes. If that doesn't get you in the mood to fly, nothing will.

 

Thanks again VP!

Edited October 30, 2009 by _CaptSopwith

[Creaghorn 10]

win 7 just arrived today. so saitek evo force loses it's force feedback with win7. did i get it right?

[Siggi 10]

win 7 just arrived today. so saitek evo force loses it's force feedback with win7. did i get it right?

 

Probably. I believe the Saitek FFB drivers are generic and mine certainly don't work in W7.

[sitting_duck 3]

If any of you w7 users could attempt to host a mp game, would greatly appreciate it.

 

You would not actually need to connect to anyone, just need to see if you can get to the point where your mp game acutally starts.

 

pds tuturial for getting a game is is a great guide. As it was made prior to 1.32 super patch, some sceens are different.

 

http://www.wingsofhonour.com/overflandersfields/tipsandtricks/html_woh_overflandersfields_tipsandtricks.en.html#findingserversforoff

[Siggi 10]

If any of you w7 users could attempt to host a mp game, would greatly appreciate it.

 

You would not actually need to connect to anyone, just need to see if you can get to the point where your mp game acutally starts.

 

pds tuturial for getting a game is is a great guide. As it was made prior to 1.32 super patch, some sceens are different.

 

http://www.wingsofhonour.com/overflandersfields/tipsandtricks/html_woh_overflandersfields_tipsandtricks.en.html#findingserversforoff

 

I just tried, error message at the popint of going into the plane: "Program has stopped working".

[sitting_duck 3]

thanks alot siggi,,i belive thats the same point someone elses game stops....

[Kamikaze 0]

Thats not good! I'm almost to where I can start looking at mp and Win7 too. But having to deal with a family issue right now . . so it will be another couple of weeks.

[sitting_duck 3]

well,,i certainly hope you can make some headway kamikaze. But if your thinking about w7, it might be a very good idea to think about a dualboot system as well...