G400: Odd OpenGL Problems Continue

[Phil MURC]

Regarding releasing an unsupported utility.....

Haig - YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES


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Phil (MURC's G200 : WWW.G200.COM

[This message has been edited by Phil MURC (edited 07-30-99).]

[Gurm]

This gets more and more interesting. Here's a quick recap for those of you just joining:

1. Many G400 owners (many being at least 5 or 6) who have used Powerstrip to overclock their G400 have experienced problems with their card. These problems include:

- Incorrect speed dividers, effectively underclocking the card
- Crashing and lockups when attempting to access chip information
- Other miscellaneous issues

2. The only solution to these problems seems to be flashing the BIOS on the card.

3. However, the BIOS isn't changed. Nothing in the BIOS is different according to Haig. Therefore it is the ACT of flashing that fixes the problem, not the BIOS itself.

4. Ashley (Powerstrip programmer) staunchly maintains that PS cannot and does not modify the BIOS in any way (which appears to be the case).

5. Therefore, it must be some sort of accidental side-effect whose only cure is reflashing the BIOS.

Suggested areas of focus now:

- What does the BIOS flasher do besides actually reprogramming the BIOS? Does it change the registry, or anything else?

- Somebody needs to test Performance Tuner. Ashley maintains that they are the same code therefore should break the same way if they break. Others feel that Performance Tuner doesn't break the G400. We need definitive answers.

- Everyone needs to calm down a notch. Just one notch.

----------- GURM -----------

[arbymo]

Haig : YES !!! go for it


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GigaByte 6BXE, celeron 300A@464, 128 PC100 RAM,
G200 8 M SD @112.5 core. driver 4.51, bios 2.3.

[Haig]

Ashley,

"HELLO! - Is there an engineer in the house? Anyone anywhere who wants to contest this simple truism? I didn't criticize your HAL tool; I said I didn't know WTF it was, as it's not publicly available. You respond by telling me what "HAL" stands for... Thanks!"

Hmm, well ok, I guess I owe you an apology, I think.

I though that my answer:

"HAL = Hardware Abstraction Layer
HAL tool = Hardware Abstraction Layer tool.

It's a utility that we have which tells us
everything we need to know about every single register in our chip. It also allows us to modify any register on our chip and also pop up warning messages anytime some other party tries to access our registers, among other things."

to your question:

"but I have no idea what HAL is."

was the answer you were looking for.

Haig

[This message has been edited by Haig (edited 07-30-99).]

[paulcs]

For the sake of illustration, I'll post some "before and after" numbers. The before numbers were achieved during July 4th weekend, right after I bought the board. The after numbers are from tonight. Note that I have flashed my BIOS twice.

Before: Quake2 demo1.dm2

800x600/16-bit - 74.2, 74.4, 74.3
1024x768/16-bit - 62.8, 64.5, 64.6

After: Quake2 demo1.dm2

800x600/16-bit - 69.2, 71.1, 71.3
1024x768/16-bit - 60.0, 61.8, 61.7

Before: 3DMark99 Max

3D Marks 4753, 4753, 4785
CPU 3DMarks 7434, 7467, 7515

After: 3DMark99 Max

3D Marks 4591, 4625, 4639
CPU 3DMarks 7258, 7198, 7154

Before: Kingpin Demo timedemo

800x600/High: 43.3, 44.6, 44.6
1024x768/High: 40.5, 41.7, 41.7

After: Kingpin Demo timedemo

800x600/16-bit High: 40.3, 41.3, 41.3
1024x768/16-bit High: 37.8, 38.8, 38.7

(For the most part, I stuck with the "Planet Kingpin" conventions with respect to high settings: fog on, shadows auto, painskins high, props yes, texture quality high.)

The lockups continue, although only when my machine is connected to the network (and DSL modem).

Again, I flashed the board's BIOS twice, so I'm not quite sure what happened.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Fifth Horseman]

Of all of you who are having problems with PS with the G400, who among you are using an overclocked system with a high AGP clock?

Even if your not overclocking your system, are you using the stock heatsink and/or fan that comes with the card?

I know that those two questions sound kind of odd, but the reason I'm asking them is because of an incident that had happened with the first G200 board I owned, that may or may not be related to the problems some G400 owners are having.



-FH =)

[Wombat]

paulcs,
It sounds like you might have dropped a big hint there. Have you checked to see what your interrupts are? If your lock-ups occur only when on the network, my first suspicion is that your network card is trying to share in IRQ channel with another device, and someone doesn't know how to play nice. Try the MS system information tool, hardware->shared resources/IRQs (something like that, I'm on a Ultra10 right now, no MS for me).

-Wombat


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503+ rev 1.2a, 128MB PC100 RAM, K6-2/350@400,RH6 & Win98,G200 Millenium (SGRAM), no plans to buy a G400