Fails under Windows 7

[Rilian]

I'm finding that the demo of Mayhem is about the only game (of many I've tried) that fails under Windows 7 32-bit. The start splash screen has half the text lines replaced with large white rectangles; on launching the game it sort of runs and you can just about play but it's very, very slow. The mouse pointer is fine but everything else seems to update at around 4 fps or worse.

Video card is ATI x1950, drivers dated 10/12/2008 version 8.56.1.4 (I think they're the beta Win7 ones from ATI rather than Microsoft but I'm not 100% sure).

The same computer runs it beautifully when dual-booted to XP, of course.

Is this a general Win7 issue, or specific to the video drivers I have (or, OK, it could be the sound or something else I suppose, but it looks like a video problem).

Rilian

[Kumlekar]

You'll have to get a confirmation from chris, but I believe this is an issue with OpenGL not being compatible with windows 7.

[Chris]

More specifically, it's an issue with ATI's current beta Windows 7 drivers not providing support for OpenGL:

Known Issues

This section provides information on known issues that may be experienced under
the Windows 7 operating system with the latest release of the Catalyst™ Windows
7 Preview Driver Package. These include the following:

• Open GL is not supported under Windows 7 - 64 bit editions.

By "not supported" they mean "if it breaks, don't come running to us about it" - OpenGL does "work", as you discovered, it's just (A) buggy and (B) not hardware-accelerated, so it runs in sloooow software mode. It might run a bit faster if you turn the image quality down to Low on the options screen (Low image quality is specifically designed to speed up software rendering).

Presumably ATI will add full OpenGL support to a future version of their driver, before Windows 7 leaves beta.