Does it matter if video card drivers are installed for zd?

[invictius]

I figured since it uses software rendering, and you only run into problems running games requiring 3d with "standard vga adapter" installed, I might be fine. This is on xp and 7.

[Kinsie]

[invictius]

Sometimes their simply are none for 7. 7 is able to display 16-bit color without any drivers, all that I notice is that window dragging is laggy.

[Kinsie]

What GPU do you have? Cause if it's old enough that there's NO drivers for it on Windows 7, full stop, you're probably gonna have trouble running ZDoom software or no (especially since IIRC the software renderer on Windows uses Direct3D for the 2D overlay - HUD, menus, weapon sprites, etc.)

[invictius]

What GPU do you have? Cause if it's old enough that there's NO drivers for it on Windows 7, full stop, you're probably gonna have trouble running ZDoom software or no (especially since IIRC the software renderer on Windows uses Direct3D for the 2D overlay - HUD, menus, weapon sprites, etc.)

It was a geforce 4000, and I recall a friend getting a computer without the video card drivers installed - I'm just surprised that windows 7 handles it better than 9x (16 color and 640x480 only!) - however, I've tried some of those mini xp bootable cd's that bring up zdoom just fine.

[PlayerLin]

Since it's DX 8 card and only have OpenGL 1.3(as all cards from GeForce 4 series were), the latest driver for this series is Win2000/XP so it won't be works on Win7. The M$ driver coming with Windows 7 may works, but its performance just non-existent, that's why you got laggy when window dragging.

You can try install the latest XP driver for that series(ForceWare Release 93.71 or 93.81) with Windows compatibility on XP level, but still, not recommend as Win7 was not supported.

And even if it works, it may still laggy as hell or cause your system become unstable.

[Rachael]

Since it's DX 8 card and only have OpenGL 1.3(as all cards from GeForce 4 series were), the latest driver for this series is Win2000/XP so it won't be works on Win7. The M$ driver coming with Windows 7 may works, but its performance just non-existent, that's why you got laggy when window dragging.

You can try install the latest XP driver for that series(ForceWare Release 93.71 or 93.81) with Windows compatibility on XP level, but still, not recommend as Win7 was not supported.

And even if it works, it may still laggy as hell or cause your system become unstable.

I don't think this is entirely correct. Windows 7 was the last version of Windows to support the XP-based drivers, but still it did officially support them so installing any sort of XP drivers (officially XPDM, if you want to Google it) should work just fine.

Keep in mind, however, that you will be unable to upgrade to Windows 8/8.1/10 with these drivers, you also lose the ability to use DWM (Aero, window flipping, etc), and you lose the auto-recovery ability that WDDM-based drivers provide (where, if your driver crashes, Windows can simply restart the driver instead of blue-screening your system).

However, both Direct3D and OpenGL do become available as accelerated to the system using these drivers, meaning games can use them. You just can't run games that required more advanced features than these drivers originally provided. GZDoom's OpenGL mode would be among them, if you want to know - however Software mode should still work and it will be much faster.

[Graf Zahl]

Is this just out of some academic interest or do you actually plan to use the computer for some real work or gaming? If it's the former, ok, but if it's the latter I strongly recommend to get something more modern in there. These old cards are mostly useless these days, their hardware accelerated capabilities are so weak that they won't be able to do more than run the most basic 15 year old stuff, and normally the VGA default driver is better equipped to handle them than some long abandoned XP driver.