g400 and win2k problem

[andrew parker]

Hi

I've just installed win2k beta3 and of course my g400 is not on the list of
supported hardware. I went to http://www.matrox.com/mga/drivers/la...ivers/home.htm to download the
latest win2k driver (listed as BETA 5.00.007, but in the downloaded
READENG.TXT as 5.00.013). When I installed this and re-started win2k I got a
BSOD with the following info:

STOP: c0000263 {Driver Entry Point Not Found}
The ...\g400m.sys device driver could not locate the entry point
VideoPortQueueDpc in driver VIDEOPORT.SYS ...

I tried re-installing a couple of times, either running the g400 driver's setup.exe, or using win2k's Add New Hardware, but to no avail.

Matrox Support (UK) suggested setting the AGP Aperture Size in my ABIT BE6 mainboard BIOS from 64k to 256k, again no change. Matrox Support dried-up at this point, the friendly guy I had spoken with the first time was replaced by a hostle robot. I know it's only beta but it is Xmas!

My suspicion is that maybe my copy of win2k (build 2031) is too old for the driver ?

Any thoughts or suggestions warmly welcomed. Thanks, AP (new here)

[paulcs]

Andrew, I think your suspicions are correct. I think Matrox, given that the OS has gone gold and is about to be released, had to aim a bit higher than Beta 3, or RC2 for that matter.

I thought the transition from RC2 to RC3 would involve a bug fix here, a cosmetic fix there, but it appears to have been fairly substantial as far as display adapters go. RC3 users are reporting much better results than I have been getting with RC2 and, one assumes, the jump from Beta 3 to RC3 was fairly substantial.

I've noticed this with non-Matrox boards and drivers as well. NVidia hasn't officially released W2K drivers, but there have been quite a few leaked W2K drivers and NT hacks floating around throughout W2K's evolution.

With a TNT2 running on W2K RC2, I can get something approximating proper 3D acceleration using older leaked drivers that were released just after RC2 was. (If I use drivers written for RC1 and Beta 3, I lose all Direct3D functionality, as RC2 requires DirectX 7 support.) I've had no luck getting newer drivers to work, although I suspect they do much better with RC3 and the RTM build.

If you're a member of Microsoft's Corporate Preview Program, you can order a 120 day evalution upgrade of Build 2195. The disk is free, but they really nail you for shipping and handling (about $15.00).

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[PaulS]

Hi Paul,

I was using RC3 with the latest drivers on a G200. I had been holding off on buying the G400 until I could see some reasonable progress from Matrox on developing a fast and stable Windows 2000 driver.

Anyway, I was pretty impressed with the G200 driver, so I purchased a couple of G400's for our main development computers. Unfortunately I had a lot of problems with them, so they are currently sitting on the shelf waiting for the next update. I couldn't even get them to spin the cube in dxdiag without freezing (more often than not). OpenGL screen savers crashed, Q3 crashed continually, Q2 had bizzare colours. Flight Simulator 2000 locks up randomly. Many of the crashes were so severe that I didn't even get a BSOD, just a reboot. Glad I'm using NTFS!

So I am back to the G200's, which are working quite well. Matrox has had DX drivers for the G200 available since beta 2, so I guessing that this longer OPEN testing program has resulted in G200 drivers that are ahead of the G400.

Hopefully the RTM version will be posted on MSDN soon, I'll retry the G400's then. In the meantime, I have reported the bugs to Matrox and am happy to put the cards back in if they want any more info, but so far no reply.

Paul