TGB 1.7 for casual game market?

#1 Have you had them disable Aero and update their graphics drivers? Have most of them been Intel GMA chipsets?

#2 Many of the cards are ATI cards. I'm not sure about the Intel GMA chipsets. Even if it is Intel GMA chipsets, other casual game engines seem to not have this issue, so is there a fix for the situation? Casual gamers typical have lower end machines so I was wondering if TGB 1.7 compensates for that at all?

Thanks for your help.

#3 I'm not sure about back-end work on the OpenGL side between the 1.1.3 and 1.7.4 codebases. A lot of engines have had problems with the GMA chipset, though, and a lot of GL-based engines have had problems with ATI cards under Vista.

Have you incorporated Amanda Fitch's team's patches for determining video acceleration levels? It might be helpful in reporting.

#4 Many of the cards are ATI cards. I'm not sure about the Intel GMA chipsets. Even if it is Intel GMA chipsets, other casual game engines seem to not have this issue, so is there a fix for the situation? Casual gamers typical have lower end machines so I was wondering if TGB 1.7 compensates for that at all?

Thanks for your help.

#5 I can most likely tell you why ATI cards do not work with your game.

Windows Update has 2 ATI Drivers for my laptop.
Both are Microsoft versions of the ATI drivers meaning.
BAREBONES, NO OPENGL SUPPORT.
(yes I know about the d3d wrapper, doesnt work on any of my vista machines,
the game loads but the window does not render, strangely if you have aero and hold
the mouse on the taskbar the application preview popup will show the game but the window
will not render the game.)

Have the ATI users go to www.ati.com / www.amd.com and download
the drivers off the website.

If they have a laptop with older x300 or 200M style onboard chipsets
the problem gets even worse. ATI Drivers do not include new drivers
for these chipsets so you have to use a 3rd party application to modifiy the
lastest drivers to support the older chipsets.

#6 200M style graphic cards don't meet the WDDM driver requirements, similar to the GMA 900. They only have XPDM drivers and can only run DX applications therefor on Vista. Don't know about the X300, potentially its no fullscale shader GPU with the needed vertex shader features as well (thats the issue for the gma)

If you only use 2D features, the users potentially can switch to the DX driver.
On the long go, the only option for you is to get TGB Pro and integrate a fullscale DX9 backend. The DX8 wrap approach is crap and cuts the performance by 30-70% depending on the system, above that it had (still has? have not tested it) no 3d object support.

General: Mobile chipsets are and ever will be a problem.
Not only because the manufacturers fake there a lot on the naming ( an 8600M GT is nowhere comparable to an 8600GT for example. its more towards an 8400GT to 8500GT and all the like), also because the system manufacturers can modify the drivers (mobile drivers in general can not just be downloaded from ATI / NVIDIA) adds 2 further problems to the equation of supporting notebooks

#7 I have a 200M based laptop.
OpenGL works fine as long as you use real ATI drivers.
Just don't use the ones off windows update.