A proposal for implementing dxdiag.exe: thoughts?

[Stefan Dösinger]

Am 31.03.2010 um 22:41 schrieb John Koelndorfer:
>> 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?
They pass on Linux/Wine on Nvidia cards. They don't pass on fglrx due to a few (documented) driver bugs, similarly on OSX. I think the tests pass in Mesa Software.

> 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.
It's not that big, and the actual architecture is irrelevant, what is important is the behavior games see. It is helpful to know the differences between the Windows versions. For example, I recently noticed that a game called Shaiya performs D3D calls that didn't make sense. Those calls failed on Windows 7, with Wine behaving in the same way the game crashed. WinXP behaved differently, making Shaiya happy. And indeed Shaiya crashed on Windows 7 too.

Thinking more about this though, debugging the tests and thus debugging possible driver bugs requires a lot of in-depth knowledge about various obscure D3D features, so it is probably not suitable for newcomers.