wondering about OpenGL

[brettk30]

Hey I recently installed battlefield 3 and VLC gave me an error and crashed soon as the game loaded, upon googling what the issue was, I found the game does not like to share its directx with anything and thus vlc cant output using its default method.

The fix people recommended was using OpenGL as the output and this fix worked. I tried googling about OpenGL to find more information about it since the colors seemed richer when using it, and found mention of OLD posts with people claiming it ran their systems alot harder than directx did.

Am I to believe openGL is better at video playback? or no, because any information I am finding seems old.

on my system they do not appear to run the system hard using either one, however I am not sure if the people finding OpenGL to be taxing on their systems were using it for games or media playback

any insight into this would be helpful, is running both of them same time bad? for other games that use directx but do not shut down VLC should I use directx or OpenGL? I use an intel 3770k i7 cpu, and 4gb 680gtx msi nvidia card.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

OpenGL is cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) while DirectX is Windows only. Outside of that difference the two are essentially identical in capabilities and performance. As long as you are running the video drivers from NVidia, and not the WDDM drivers from Windows update (no OpenGL support), there's no problem running both on the same system.

 

[brettk30]

how do I check if I have those windows drivers active? I use nvidia control panel to control my multi monitors and stuff so that mean only nvidia drivers are active?

 

[ex_bubblehead]

Your original post indicates that OpenGL is working, therefore you have the correct driver.