A proposal for implementing dxdiag.exe: thoughts?

[John Koelndorfer]

> I am still skeptical about the directx conformance test part. For one part, we already
> have this: It's our regular unit tests, to be found in dlls/d3d?/tests/*, dlls/ddraw/tests/*,
> etc.

OK -- it would definitely not make sense to redo the work if the tests
are completed to satisfaction.
In that case, I would recommend renaming/clarifying the suggested GSOC
project on the Wine wiki.
It seems to suggest that conformance tests need to be written.

> For end user purposes it would make more sense to write tests testing for known driver bugs and
> report them to the user, stating a possible solution(usually "hope for a driver update") and possible
> game specific problems this may cause. I'm not convinced that this is worth the effort however, since
> usually all we can tell the user is that his driver is broken and that the game won't run no matter what
> he does.

I'm not convinced that would be worthwhile either. AppDB seems to
document those types of things just
fine already, and as you say the solution is most likely "wait for a
driver update."

> Concerning tests, a possible project would be to pick an ATI and Nvidia GPU and make sure that our existing
> conformance tests pass on both GPUs on at least WinXP, WinVista and Win7. Currently there is no single
> Windows setup that can run all the tests successfully(usually because the tests are too strict), and that is a shame.

Not even Alexandre's? :-) I don't know that this would necessarily be
worth it either. I might be wrong but doesn't
even a minor change to a graphics driver have a chance to cause a test
to fail? If that's the case, I'd certainly
not want to try to get tests passing between WinXP and WinVista/7
since the architectural difference is
enormous.

Thank you for the input. I will work on a few other proposals and
shoot them to the list soon. Hopefully I can have
them formally submitted within the next few days.

As always, thanks!