G400 and system shock 2+ drakan

[Wannabe]

Hello everybody.

Since I bought the Matrox G400 32 MB RAM four weeks ago, I have a lot of problems with this videocard and my 3D-Games.
Nearly every Game is crashing randomly during playing. (90 % just back to the desktop, the other 10 % it reboots my computer or the game freezes, or I get the blue screen)

Applications:
Drakan (no patch available yet) / System Shock 2 (no patch available yet) / Unreal (Patch 2.25) / NHL 99 (Latest Patch)

Occurs on every resolution, with 32Bit Z buffer enabled and disabled, when Card is forced to AGP 1-Mode, AGP 2-Mode or AGP-Default with the REGHacktool from Matrox (it seems to run better with AGP 1X, at least I think so, but I´m not sure )
In Drakan, I have disabled Bump-Mapping, but the crashing went on. (By the way, Bump-Mapping was one big reason for me to buy this high-standard videocard, and turning it off is not the way it should be.)
Another problem with System Shock 2 is, that with the 5.25 and 5.13 Drivers the textures on all doors are corrupt while the player is moving. The textures are messed up, blinking, just corrupt. 5.11 is the only driver that works. Any idea about that ?


System Config:

- Gigabyte 6BXC / Intel 440 BX AGPset
- Intel Pentium III 450 MHZ
- 128 MB RAM
- Windows 98 Second Edition
- DirectX 6.1 (DXDiagnostic says that everything is OK)
- Matrox G400 32 MB (NOT the MAX, NOT Dual-Head)
- 5.25 (Powerdesk), The latest Bios 1.4 from the Matrox Homepage
- Windows Desktop Resolution 800x600 and 16 Bit
- Soundblaster 128 PCI (latest Driver from the Creative Labs Homepage)
- Mitsumi FX 24 CDROM
- ISDN-Card


Please help me, cause I`m out of ideas what to do next and I´m very frustrated cause I expected much from this video-card, and now nothing seems to work properly.
Thanx

[Nuno]

- Update the card to the latest bios
- Use drivers 5.25 (seem to me the most stable to date, and the SS2 is a known issue, it´ll be fixed in the next release)
- Use the matrox uninstaller utitlity to uninstall previous drivers
- use the most recent drivers and bios for all your hardware
- Be sure to assign a IRQ to VGA and make sure the IRQ is 9 or higher and not shared with no other device.
- Set the AGP aperture to 128 or 256 Mb
- Disable all video bios caching or shadowing

Do you overclock? Do you have enough cooling in the case? Those random reboots seems much like a heat issue. Check if yor CPU heatsink is properly seated and a little bit of thermal paste won´t hurt - every cpu, even not overclocked should use it. Have you recently upgraded the RAM (faulty memory can cause the most strange random lockups)?

Have you tried format and reinstall windows?

If nothing of this works, remove all cards, boot only with the G400 and try if it work. If it does, add one card at a time and troubleshoot untill you find the culprit. That ISDN card looks preety suspicious.

And of course, you may have a faulty video card (very unlikely).

[This message has been edited by Nuno (edited 09-18-1999).]

[cpld005]

I had problems with NHL99 crashing to the desktop in resolutions over 640X480. BOught NHL2000 and have had no problems, plus the game itself is way better, your bettter off chucking the NHL99 and going with the new one.

[Skynet8]

Hi.
I've noticed that you've a Sound Blaster PCI 128 card. I've a SBLive! Value and it's causing my games to crash 5 seconds after they start, so I've changed my card to an old AWE64 and they work great. Try removing your PCI 128 card and see whether your games work.

[Wannabe]

Thank you, Nuno,

with disabling in the Motherboard-Bios from
"Video-Bios cacheable" and
"Video Shadow Bios"
my Matrox G400 seems to work better than ever.
I´m not sure cause Drakan is crashing while using the inventory and the system shock 2 door textures are tearing, but I know that this are known issues and I hope that a) the new powerdesk software and b) the drakan patch will be available soon....
But so far...thanx