After 4 years it's time for me to buy a new computer.

I hadn't seen anything from DAZ or on this forum about running Bryce on Vista, so before I went off and got a fancy Vista Ultimate computer, I thought I'd give Bryce a spin on the new OS.

I have a partition on my work laptop that runs Vista Enterprise, so I loaded up Bryce 6.0.1 and gave it a quick 10 minute test drive.  It runs, loads, saves, renders and lets you modify things.  The windows are a bit funky at the top, but UI challenges are nothing new for Bryce.

While I hardly did any comprehensive testing, Bryce seems to run fine on Vista.

Has anybody else tried it and run into any problems?

I've heard about opengl problems on Vista.  Does that work ok?

Vista will have to have newer OpenGL support written in by ATI/Nvidia to get speed back up to where it is for current XP users in all OpenGL accelerated 3D apps from what I read. Bryce shouldn't have any major problems in Vista, though I have not found any official word from Daz or other, that B6 is fully supported in Vista, yet(even though it may work fine). Others here that have Vista(Im not upgrading for awhile) will have more info.

btw, I hear that Vista does have some OpenGL support(v. 1.1 I think), but its slower than XP's more mature video/other drivers for now. 

May also depend on whether you install the 32-bit Vista or the 64-bit (both are supposed to be on the DVD).  XP 64-bit has had problems primarily with the installer DAZ used which required it to be run in a restricted 32 bit environment (Win98 compatibility mode) through installation and first start until you had your serial number registered.

Since that stage I haven't had any noticeable problems running B6 on XP 64 bit though it won't recognize any extra memory the OS may have available.

Brett

there's a thread on Vista in the Poser forum. There's something awry with the new version of Windows Media Player, according to them.

My test was on 32-bit Vista.
I don't have a single 64-bit application, so I think it's premature for that.

As for Open GL, I did try loading Daz|Studio both from within Bryce and stand-alone and that does load Open GL according to the initialization messages. Other than the fact that I have no content loaded (it is a work machine after all), it seemed to work fine.

On a related question, the laptop is a Centrino Duo, and Bryce seems to render with both cores.  Has anyone tried it on a real dual or quad core system to see if it uses the full horsepower to render?

Bryce 6.0 will render on all cores it finds(Laptop/Towers etc..) according to what I read here and DAZ forums, even dual quads

Oh yeah, forgot to mention, B6 will only use multi cores on render full option to screen renders, until the 6.1 update(that I have read, I only have single core).

As I understand it, in most cases OpenGL is supported through the video card not the OS. Vista has OGL in DirectX but it's supposedly vastly slower then running it off the video card. And yes - on the Mac and PC, Bryce6 uses near 100% of the processors available.