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Video driver updates |
As
WindowBlinds tends to stress the video card more than displaying standard
windows, it generally is important to ensure that your video card drivers
are updated if you are having difficulties. Driver difficulties are
particularly acute on Windows 9x/ME (NT/2000 drivers are generally more
well-behaved).
The latest reference drivers for many
different cards/chipsets can be found linked from http://www.voodooextreme.com/hw/Binaries/drivers.html. |
NVIDIA chipsets/cards (128/TNT/TNT2/GeForce/GeForce2) |
Very old
NVIDIA drivers had a bug which corrupted the display of text in dialogs on
Windows 9x. Updating to the latest Detonator reference drivers (or drivers
from your card manufacturer) will correct the problem.
NVIDIA reference drivers: www.nvidia.com |
ATI Rage Pro / II / II+ / LT / 128 |
ATI's currently released drivers for the above cards on Windows 9x contain some bugs which may cause video corruption or lockups. ATI has beta level drivers available which correct this issue. Visit http://www.ati.com/na/pages/spdrivers/index.html to download these drivers. ATI users with these chipsets on NT4 should download these drivers as well if you experience window borders being misaligned. If your buttons on NT4 seem a little odd looking, see the Tips and Tricks section of the WB help file for information on using the GoodStretch WB.INI setting.
|
SiS/Neomagic integrated video chipsets |
Very common
on laptops, the SiS and Neomagic chipsets generally work fine with
WindowBlinds when using the latest drivers. It may be advisable to use the
System object in the Control Panel to reduce hardware acceleration by a
notch if you are experiencing problems. This should not impact the speed
of your video, just how agressively Windows tries to use the video memory
for additional information. |
Banshee cards |
Banshee
drivers have a bug where the right portion of buttons would sometimes be
corrupted. WindowBlinds 1.31z and later incorporate a workaround to
eliminate this issue. |
Chipsets with hardware acceleration |
On Windows
2000 only, the 5.10 or later G400 beta drivers from Matrox and the
Permedia2 drivers support the optional driver calls of drvAlphaBlend and
drvTransparentBlt. This dramatically accelerates alpha-blending and
transparent blitting. These driver calls are optional parts of DDK for
Windows, so we aren't aware of any drivers other than Matrox/Permedia2
which have implemented them yet. To enable HW acceleration on Windows
2000, add the following to the [GLOBAL] section of WB.INI (located in
\windows or \winnt, create the file if necessary):
UseHWAcc=1 |