Upgrading G400

[Nuno]

Gee, totally forgot this thread

Easy. Just solder a couple resistors, Vcore to 5 volts, Liquid Nitrogen cooling.... he he, sorry, I just had to say that

About Wolfenstein test, those results are with a Herc 4500 @ 180 Mhz, Win2k drivers 8.162, Tb900@1000 (144 fsb), Asus A7V133. 1024x768x32, all settings maxed out (even coronas)

As you might know KyroII gets a HUGE speed increase in Quake3 engine games if you enable texture compression (specially if doing trilinear). Now for some reason, texture compression is an option in the game menu, but it´s not really working... so just go to the 3d optimization tab in the drivers, do a custom entry for wolfenstein and Disable V-sync, Force Texture compression and Force single buffer.

Texture compression is the key here, but single buffering also provides a small performance boost (as it does in almost all games). As a matter of fact Kyro is the only card that can render into a single buffer without the scene going mad (polygons flickering everywere, maybe you remember of ZDlabs 3d winbench, it had some single buffer tests) because it actually only writes to the frame buffer after the whole frame is finished...

Editing: Oh and you migh enter /com_maxfps 0 in the console as it´s capping the max framerate to 90.

If you want you might download this timedemo (pretty simple I know, a guy running around and shooting), but it´s with it that people are benchmarking and comparing results

http://www.savagegamers.hu/files/benchmark/wolfenstein/demo0002.zip

[Gurm]

Nuno,

Are you getting the ugly polygon madness on the sniper scope zoom?

Try it and let me know.

- Gurm

[Dan F]

Thanks for the replies,

Looks like I'll get a Kyro II

Do you know if there's any difference between the Vivid 32MB Kyro 2 and the Hercules 4500 64MB version, i.e. graphics quality, performance, OC'able?

Oh yeah, are the Kyro IIs OC'able?

Cheers

[Nuno]

Gurm: No I don´t seem to get any corruption when zooming... didn´t send much time with it, but I never noticed it. Can you give a detailed description what to do to reproduce it?

Dan: I would get a 64 Mb card for now. The price difference is not that big and games are coming that really won´t cut it on a 32 Mb card... That´s the only difference between 32mb cards and 64 Mb cards, they actually perform a few fps within each other with most current games.

About overclocking... they are a dog to overclock. Videologic seems to be a bit better, don´t know why, but Ace´s did get one at almost 200/200 Mhz. Most KyroII will do 180/180, some 185/185, more than that is just pure luck. If of any consolation, there aren´t any major performance increases with overclocking, because the with this card the bottleneck seems to be the cpu until you get a 1400-1500 Mhz thunderbird..

[Gurm]

Nuno,

No idea what I did. Just turned on texture compression in the game AND the drivers... left it at 800x600... upped the brightness a notch...

Other than that? Dunno.

- Gurm

[Nuno]

Here, try my cfg file

[Clevor]

I've got a Geforce256 DDR (1st version), and a Geforce2 Ultra, both Hercules. The 2D is not that bad at all, actually. Not as crisp and vibrant as a G400 obviously, but perfectly acceptable, even at 1600x1200. There is the text ghosting there, but the image is clean and contrast good on the Hercules.

BUT, it's a crapshoot depending on what brand card you have (Leadtek, Gainward, Visiontek, Creative, Elsa, Asus, HouseBrand). I heard the other brands, especially Creative, are pretty bad in 2D. Forget about the Hercules cards since they are pretty expensive.

With the latest Detonator drivers (11 and up), the cards are damn fast. My old Geforce256 recently posted a 5447 3DMark2000 score. My Geforce Ultra got a 3284 3DMark2001 score. This is on an 800 Thunderbird.

So yeah, you can run all the games at least 1024x768x32 and all details on, but you know what? After awhile, you really get tired of the drab colors. Everything has a monotone look to it. I just stuck in my Voodoo5 last night, and you can see the brighter and more vivid colors and the crisper output. And the G400 MAX is even better than the Voodoo5.

You can get the Geforce to look close by using GeforceTweak and setting it to best image quality, but you will lose 15-20% of the speed, so it will drop to Voodoo5 territory. Then bump up the contrast and brightness on the desktop (it will look garish). Even then, your games still won't look as good as on the Voodoo5 or Matrox. Is it worth it? Plus the FSAA , like the Radeon, is useless.

I guess if you've never seen the image quality of a Voodoo or Matrox, you will be perfectly happy with a Geforce.

I heard the Geforce3 has incorporated a 'Digital Vibrance Control'. I bet all that is is a one-button software gimmick to guess what, turn up the brightness and contrast of the desktop. I also heard the 2D is not much better than the Geforce2.

To me, the only hope for Nvidia is if they dump the NV15 and NV20 chip and start incorporating 3dfx technology in future cards, but that is 2-4 years away.

[borat]

i'd get either a ati radion sdr from dabs.com for 60 pounds (DDR oem80 pounds)or a plain vanilla creative geeforce2 gts for 75 pounds