X5 3D View Issues

[perryh]

Chief doesn't recommend it, I wonder why.

[lbuttery]

Perry:

I agree...

XP may work with newer versions of Chief

but does it work well ???

Lew

[perryh]

Thanks Lew, I was wondering why someone hasn't said the same thing.

[Doug Park]

We don't recommend XP. But not for these reasons.

The video card and XP don't have anything to do with how the ray trace is working. In fact the video card doesn't affect ray tracing at all.

Primarily we don't recommend XP due to deficiencies in the user interface and the poorer support of multiple core cpus.

XP is slower for several reasons. Under Vista/Windows 7/8 we don't have to redraw things nearly as often and the better support of multiple cores gives a slight edge in performance. The difference is in general fairly minor.

We don't test on XP as much so have lower confidence that we understand all the issues with XP.

We are also seeing poorer support for video cards under XP.

And XP doesn't support 64 bit which also gives a slight overall edge in performance and a big edge if you need to access more memory.

There are lots of good reasons not to use XP, but functionally Chief should work right on XP. In almost all cases where we see something that doesn't work right on XP it also doesn't work right on other platforms.