The G400 and SMP (Win2k) Thread

[jpb]

a multi-processor system cannot "balance the load" in a single application unless it is written specifically to take advantage of multiple processors: ie, by making constructive use of multiple threads. There is no way for any OS to break up a single-threaded process to run simultaneously on multiple processors, since it can't possibly know what pieces can safely run in parallel.

On the other hand, if the OS is running the application on one CPU, it can run many or all other tasks on the second cpu. If there are cpu-intensive I/O processes (such as software DVD or encoding) that are managed by a multi-threaded driver or out-of-process server, you can get a significant boost in actual performance from the system as a whole. This can appear to make a single-threaded application run faster.

[Chucky Cheese]

travis,

yes i did, and it "sucked", the game play was not enjoyable. i installed quake 3 and it behaved like unreal...trashed my screen in a dual processor boot...ran ok in a single processor boot.

after creative releases their live drivers this month i'm going to seriously consider wipeing scsi id 0, and installing win2k.

right now i'm drooling about getting my 17" .264 Flat Panel to put on the #2 vga port. i got a good price on my 15" fpd from a friend at work....later!

chucky

[Travis L. Knodel]

Good, I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one having severe fps problems in UT when bus mastering is turned off and a total f*ck up in Quake 3 when the games STARTS.

I guess we're just going to have to sit on this thing like the NT 4 users have been for a year now, even after extensive complaints from users. I'm not going to make this mistake again, my next card is an nVidia card. If you tell them that you have a problem with the driver, it's fixed in a matter of days UNLIKE MATROX Just have to get the cash flow to buy the 32 Meg DDR when the 64 Megger comes out.

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=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Travis L. Knodel
ICQ 5570732

Abit BP6
Dual Celeron 366@523 Mhz
Matrox G400 16MB SH
IBM ATA66 15.2 GB HD w/ 2MB cache
WD UDMA33 4.3 GB POS HD
Acer 40X CD Rom
Memorex 1622 2x2x6 CD-RW
Internal NEC Zip100
Netgear 10/100 Ethernet
Diamond Monster Sound MX300
Altec Lansing ACS 295
Proview 17" Monitor
224 MBs generic PC100 RAM

[PaulS]

It's pretty frustrating, there are plenty of people in this forum that reckon Matrox will turn a corner with W2k, but it looks very much like the same old NT story. Great hardware let down by shoddy or incomplete drivers.

It's pretty obvious why those MS certified drivers haven't surfaced.

Paul

[Chucky Cheese]

pauls,

i hope that is not the case. from my own empirical observations, it seems as though the software developement is "out of sync" with the hardware(..or product cycle) at matrox.

i started using matrox products with the Mill, then the Mill II(agp)...skipped the g100&g200..and now i have the g400. it seems as though right about the time that the drivers are really tweaked, a new bus or a new standard comes along that makes them introduce a new product line that everybody wants...then its' the start of the cycle again...

anyways, i can just boot to single processor and play games..then i'm ok with that. am i missing something...i don't see the value of turning bus mastering off, and seeing if the games run! what does this tell me?? i have no problems with it turned on. isn't that like buying a corvette and putting a 4 cyl. engine in it,,,and then wondering why it isn't as fast as a V-8???

chucky

[Chucky Cheese]

YEAH !!!!!!!!

i've been promoted!!!!!!

chucky

[Travis L. Knodel]

Hey, props chuck.

your observation is correct... that's the reason I got from under my Banshee card, the drivers seem to only get good after a year of slow incremental development... think about it now...

WHO WOULD WANT A BANSHEE NOW, even if the drivers are great now?!?!?

nVidia seems to have this thing right... I wish ya'll could see how many drivers they've released and updated since the GeForce Windows 2000 drivers came out... it's about the same amount of times that Matrox has done the same for 98... it's soooooooo sad. No, it's not sad, it's LIMP DICK PATHETIC...oh well...


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=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Travis L. Knodel
ICQ 5570732

Abit BP6
Dual Celeron 366@523 Mhz
Matrox G400 16MB SH
IBM ATA66 15.2 GB HD w/ 2MB cache
WD UDMA33 4.3 GB POS HD
Acer 40X CD Rom
Memorex 1622 2x2x6 CD-RW
Internal NEC Zip100
Netgear 10/100 Ethernet
Diamond Monster Sound MX300
Altec Lansing ACS 295
Proview 17" Monitor
224 MBs generic PC100 RAM

[Travis L. Knodel]

Fresh install of Quake III with no prior settings put in the folder... freezes after the movie... hmm... wonder why?



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=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Travis L. Knodel
ICQ 5570732

Abit BP6
Dual Celeron 366@523 Mhz
Matrox G400 16MB SH
IBM ATA66 15.2 GB HD w/ 2MB cache
WD UDMA33 4.3 GB POS HD
Acer 40X CD Rom
Memorex 1622 2x2x6 CD-RW
Internal NEC Zip100
Netgear 10/100 Ethernet
Diamond Monster Sound MX300
Altec Lansing ACS 295
Proview 17" Monitor
224 MBs generic PC100 RAM

[PaulS]

Anyone notice that Matrox is pretty much ignoring all the Windows 2000 questions on their own forum?

Surely some of the OEMs must be starting to get a little nervous - or maybe they just aren't using w2k?

Paul

[Travis L. Knodel]

Gee... I was kind thinking the same thing Paul. Everytime I post something on their forum, I get some dumbassed answer such as:

"Have you checked with Abit?"

WTF is that? I don't think that Abit motherboards have anything do with the fact that my screen freezes up when I enable bus mastering. Or the fact that Quake III, Half Life, and Quake II don't even START on my machine because it leaves nasty images that can't be deciferred (sp?).

Could this stem from the fact that Matrox doesn't give a shit?!?! Kinda discerning that Matrox gets it's biggest audience from developers who use two monitors and that from what I've heard, hasn't even been enabled on Windows 2000. It's not like Matrox had a full year to get a WORKING ICD out the door for Windows 2000. It's not like Matrox has had even more time to have a WORKING Open GL ICD for Windows NT 4. It's not like the Windows 98 drivers are only decent because of the RECENT arrivals of the TurboGL drivers.

Matrox needs to get a clue and get it really quick here. Two years ago nVidia was a no name company and now here they are with the loyalist fans and the fastest drivers/boards.

Q: YOU WANNA KNOW HOW THEY GOT THERE MATROX?!?!

A: They listened to the customers that were experiencing problems and said let me do something about it... they didn't pass it off as a fault to some other compenent when things went wrong. They also had a driver building team that was willing to listen to problems, instead of not even admitting the problems and going about their merry ways.

I'd be happy if Matrox just admitted to the problems. At least I would know that I'm not going insane. Users want to know what's going on with their products, instead of keeping things under the bed all the time. It builds a community atmosphere and encourages the public to build confidence in the company.

You don't make friends by not sharing the cookie, DUH!


Thank you and have a nice day



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=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Travis L. Knodel
ICQ 5570732

Abit BP6
Dual Celeron 366@523 Mhz
Matrox G400 16MB SH
IBM ATA66 15.2 GB HD w/ 2MB cache
WD UDMA33 4.3 GB POS HD
Acer 40X CD Rom
Memorex 1622 2x2x6 CD-RW
Internal NEC Zip100
Netgear 10/100 Ethernet
Diamond Monster Sound MX300
Altec Lansing ACS 295
Proview 17" Monitor
224 MBs generic PC100 RAM

[Rags]

Hi Travis and PaulS,

I have seen several posts by Matrox Employees stating that they acknowledged problems with SMP and the win2K drivers. They also stated that SMP is being looked in-to.

I haven't seen any problems running Q2 on my dual P2 system at work, I have seen numerous complaints on several newsgroups about BP6's and running Win2K with newer video cards, not just Matrox cards. Most of those were resolved with either a bios upgrade or a new power supply or both. Have you looked into these possibilities? I do know that there are a few issues with the G400 drivers and SMP, but not to the extent that you are claiming, so that tells me that there is something about your system in particular that is not quite right.

Rags

[Travis L. Knodel]

Running the QQ-2 Bios that was realeased last week.

If I remember correctly, Half Life was running on my system until I installed Quake III. After installing Quake III, crashing, then restarting, the system will give an error message when I try and open Half Life or Quake II. This only happens after I install Quake III. Does anyone have any idea why? This is on a fresh install of 2000.

To all SMP'ers I'm going to changing my config from ACPI to MPS, just for chuckles, to see if my system will run Quake III in Windows 2000. When it doesn't, I'll be sure and message you'll back as soon as I format again and recover my system.

It is comforting to hear that Matrox is passing documents that tell the problem... now all we have to do is get an official word from Matrox on this issue... any day now

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=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Travis L. Knodel
ICQ 5570732

Abit BP6
Dual Celeron 366@523 Mhz
Matrox G400 16MB SH
IBM ATA66 15.2 GB HD w/ 2MB cache
WD UDMA33 4.3 GB POS HD
Acer 40X CD Rom
Memorex 1622 2x2x6 CD-RW
Internal NEC Zip100
Netgear 10/100 Ethernet
Diamond Monster Sound MX300
Altec Lansing ACS 295
Proview 17" Monitor
224 MBs generic PC100 RAM

[PaulS]

Rags,

Having been an NT user since 3.1 was released, I really don't have any patience for drivers that can crash my system. I can accept that a game or 2 might crash, but when it takes the whole system down with it, that really annoys me. In years of NT use, I have hardly ever had an OS crash, but now I find my self holding my breath whenever I run something that uses 3D.

I have looked at MB issues, I am using the MPS HAL rather than ACPI, mainly because I thought this may have been the problem. The board works flawlessly under 98SE and ME (albeit with only one processor) no fiddling with AGP speeds or busmastering.

Paul

[Palliator]

Well I've tried to think that maybe perhaps this wasn't a driver issue after all. It seems easier to blame something else (BIOS, motherboard, brand of toothpaste) than to get to the issue. Direct 3D support *is* broken on my machine with SMP enabled. I've flashed the latest BIOS on my motherboard. There are no IRQ conflicts / sharing with the G400. I have no apparent problems with ACPI. My system has a 400W power supply. My G400 card isn't shoved in an ISA slot...

For me this hasn't been a horrific problem. Frankly, I am shocked with how little I've lost going to Win 2k. There's hardly little reason for me to go back to Win 9x. If I were more a gamer, this would be problem. However, anyone with a little hindsight would already know Win 2000 isn't a gaming OS (not that it couldn't be in the future).

I am, however, a little surprised Matrox overlooked this problem. Surely they did some testing on a SMP machine? Let's just sit tight and see if Matrox addresses the SMP issue in the next release. Now for me, Dualhead is another matter (it currently sucks in Win 2k!).

-Palliator

[This message has been edited by Palliator (edited 09 March 2000).]

[Travis L. Knodel]

Hey, let's have a race, turtle vs. turtle.... see who get's their feature in the Matrox G400 Windows 2000 drivers first.

Unlikely candidate number one: Matrox giving support to SMP.

Unlikely candidate number two: Matrox giving DHer's Dual Head capability (which I hear is really f*cked up).

------------------
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Travis L. Knodel
ICQ 5570732

Abit BP6
Dual Celeron 366@523 Mhz
Matrox G400 16MB SH
IBM ATA66 15.2 GB HD w/ 2MB cache
WD UDMA33 4.3 GB POS HD
Acer 40X CD Rom
Memorex 1622 2x2x6 CD-RW
Internal NEC Zip100
Netgear 10/100 Ethernet
Diamond Monster Sound MX300
Altec Lansing ACS 295
Proview 17" Monitor
224 MBs generic PC100 RAM