What?!!!  When did this revelation come about?  If this is the case then I might as well give up for a couple of years until I can build an updated system.

Actually it is a case of it is a bad idea to use it on ATI AGP cards until December.  Nvidia AGP systems should work ok, though the cpu may be a little higher than a PCIE system (PCIE is simply a better bus design than AGP)

Once the new ATI drivers are released, AGP 8x machines should be ok with ATI cards.  Based on testing AGP 4x is simply not up to the job which I guess is why AGP 8x and PCIE x16 were invented.

There may be a few PCIE systems from ATI which experience unusually high cpu usage but again the December drivers should resolve this as well.  This high cpu usage will show up in particular with ObjectDock running, though some tooltips may also cause slowness.

If you do experience high cpu usage before then with ATI systems then ensure you have not forced antialiasing in the driver settings.  Once the December drivers are out all should be fine with this as well.

considering that over 70% of XP systems use AGP video cards this is quite a glaring oversight

lol considering that stardock said that deskscapes was going to be XP compatible, wouldn't they have realized this problem?

the fact that deskscapes wont work on AGP yet doesn't bother me as i don't intend on using it anyway, and i know that dreams were originally only for vista, but it producing an XP version it is always worthwhile to consider what hardware those XP users are most likely to be using and work accordingly. It's nice that eventually they will work on AGP 8x but this should have been detailed right from the start. How many people have gone and downloaded/installed the program on XP only to find that it wont run or is making their computers unusable. I am just saying that clearer information right from the beginning would have been nice so people wouldn't get their hopes up and make rash desicions that they may regret

You must remember that Deskscapes requires a DirectX9 graphics card of which pretty much all of them are AGP 8x or PCIE.

Once the December ATI drivers are released the only people without support are people with AGP 1x, 2x, 4x motherboards.

What annoys me is that at no time before today have I seen SD announce that deskcapes 2.5 would probably not work on its release date for 70% of its subscribers, especially when the forums have been full of people with their tongues hanging out waiting for the release. I must admit that I feel misled.

Maybe in december if and when the drivers are released it may run fine on 8x AGP, but I fear that that the demands on the cpu/graphics card probably wont make running deskcapes full time a viable option. (or perhaps I am being over sceptical (don't know why that should be)).

Where did this 70% come from?  It is unlikely that 70% of our XP customers have ATI AGP graphics cards.

In an ideal world the ATI drivers would have been out by now, but we have to fit in with their release schedule.  We could either hold back the release until the drivers come out next month and so prevent any customers from using it even the nvidia users and PCIE users, or release it now knowing the updated drivers will be coming in December.

As for cpu usage, dynamic dreams run with their usual low cpu usage levels and video dreams depend on the video in question as on Vista. 

It stands to reason that most xp users will be using older machines which will likely have older type cards, although I admit I do not know the percentages any more than you do.

Whilst I take your point about holding the release up, my complaint is that SD did not inform in advance the people getting excited by the news of the release, creating disappointment to many.

Thank you for your reassurance that once the AGP drivers are available that it should run with low cpu usage.

Deskscapes 2.5 (with XP support published at 1pm)

• With a Dream file applied dragging and dropping icons from the desktop to a folder does not work at this time.
• Please visit this web site to review video card requirement details.  In short, AGP Video cards are not supported at this time.  Future driver updates from NVIDIA/ATI will add support later this year.  At that time only AGP 8x will be supported (4x/2x/1x bus speeds are not adequate to support dream functionality at low CPU).
• The Watercolor Dream may exhibit some distortion on Windows XP.

The above statement is from the official support thread. I read it before downloading.