So, what IS the deal with G400 opengl?

[willday]

Just picked up a G400 MAX. I love the dual monitors, but the opengl is getting me down. I'm trying to run Half-Life at 1024 under the ICD and having no luck. As soon as I start to move, the screen seems to freeze and tear, and the machine hangs hard - reset button required. Running at 800 seems to at least run, but it gets noticeably slower in any halfway complex area (hallways and small rooms are fine; large rooms get jerky just standing in place and turning around). And then, whenever I try to alt-tab from the game, it crashes with "z_malloc: failed on allocation of 491 bytes". None of these occur using the voodoo2.

Reading the forums and newsgroups, I've seen various comments about opengl ranging from:

• Half-Life runs great under 5.25
• Half-Life doesn't like the ICD
• use the 5.25 ICD with 5.30
• opengl won't work with a voodoo card installed
• only the turbogl has a problem with voodoo cards; have to uninstall D3D drivers (huh?)
• don't have to uninstall drivers; just use DirectControl
• have to turn off second desktop for opengl
• don't have to turn off second desktop for turbogl
• the ICD is messed up, beta, unfinished, buggy; the turboGL solves everything
• gl_polyoffset 2 fixes the problem (decals?)
• Tribes is written specifically to the TNT's opengl
• Tribes won't run with Matrox's buggy ICD
• G400 won't work on Abit boards
• G400 will work on Abit boards
• G400 won't work with Sblive
• G400 will work with Sblive
• and my favorite: reinstalled windows and (whatever problem) went away

Lots of comments, but very little that's conclusive, and all told, rather confusing.

So, what's the actual state of opengl on the G400? Is the ICD usable? Is it still beta? Is the 5.25 ICD better? Does Half-Life work at all under the ICD? Is the turbogl ever going to be ported to PII cpus? Is Tribes ever going to run on the G400, and whose fault is it for not running?

At the moment, I'm generally left using the voodoo2, and wondering if all I got was an expensive second desktop. :-P The turbogl does sound like it helps a lot; but I'm not sure I want to spend $300 just to play Half-Life. :-P

Machine specs:
Abit BH6, Celeron 300a, G400 MAX DH, Sblive value, Adaptec 2940uw, 3Com 3c900, Wicked3D voodoo2 (no IRQs shared)
Matrox PD 5.30, Half-Life 1.0.13, Liveware 2.1, Wicked3D 2.80
Win98 with SE update

[Petter]

Hello...

What have you tried and what was the results?

I would say loose the voodoo even if I was a voodoo-lover myself. I had problems whith my G400 MAX and my old voodoo1. When I uninstalled it, everything worked better but not perfect cause the glide.dll-files was spread across the HD. So I did what i had to: "FORMAT C:". Now things works out allright. Only one prob left, OpenGl looks nice in Halfe-life, but D3D looks better, it shouldn´t... I´ve posted a topic so I hope I can get the OpenGL-drives to do better soon.

P.S. I have the 5.30 drivers.

///Petter

------------------
PII 350
64 SDRAM PC100
G400 32 DH MAX
SB LIVE PLAYER 1024
TAXAN 17"
GRAVIS Xterminator (buy it, the best gamepad in the world)

[This message has been edited by Petter (edited 28 October 1999).]

[IceStorm]

1) You're on a Celery. TurboGL requires SSE or Athlon's extended 3DNow! instructions. You're SOL on the TurboGL.

2) As a Winblows limitation you CANNOT use hardware OpenGL support if you have MORE than one display adapter active. You can simply "disable" the second head in the Display control panel to get around this problem.

3) Search Kruzin's posts for HL under the OpenGL ICD. He doesn't have the TurboGL installed (no SSE on his box), and it works fine for him. He's got a slew of console commands he uses to tweak out the G400 so that it behaves properly under HL. I've used most of them, and they work.

4) HL is, at its core, a GLide game. You'll never get optimal performance from the G400 for it. It gets pretty close on my box, close enough so that it is quite playable, but the V2's are still a bit faster. I'm also using the TurboGL.

Just my $0.02


------------------
Primary System: PIII-540 (450@4.5x120), Soyo 6BA+ III, 2x128MB PC100 ECC SDRAM CAS2, G400 MAX in multi-monitor mode. V2 SLI rig. Two Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 900u monitors, 3Com 3C905, SoundBlaster Live!, DeskTop Theater DTT2500 DIGITAL Speaker System (Sweeeeeet!), WD AC41800 18GB HD, WD AC310100 10GB HD, Toshiba SD-M1212 6x DVD-ROM, HP 8100i CD-RW, Epson Stylus Pro, OptiUPS PowerES 650, MS SideWinder Precision Pro USB joystick, Logitech 3-button mouse, Mitsumi keyboard, Win98 SE, Belkin OmniCube 4-port KVM, 10/100 5-port Linksys Ethernet switch (30~40MB/min under Win98SE)

Secondary System: PII-266, Asus P2B BIOS 1008, 1x128MB PC100 ECC SDRAM CAS2, Millennium II, 3Com 3C590, ADSL Modem 640kbit down/90kbit up, 3Com 3C509, Mylex BT-930 SCSI card, Seagate 2GB Hawk, NEC 6x CD-ROM, Linux distro S.u.S.E. 6.1 (IP Masquerade works!), Sharp JX-9400 LJ-II compatible

Tertiary System: DFI G568IPC Intel 430HX chipset, P200MMX, 4x64MB EDO Parity RAM, Millennium II, Intel Pro/100+ client NIC, SoundBlaster 16 MCD, Fujitsu 3.5GB HD, WD 1.2GB HD, Creative Dxr3 DVD decoder card, Hitachi GD-2500 6x DVD-ROM, Win98 SE

All specs subject to change.

[Jorden]

Ice, aren't you confusing Unreal with HL now?? "4) HL is, at its core, a GLide game."

HL runs with the old optimized Quake 2 engine, so if it's Glide, how did we all play Q2 then with our G200's??

Unreal on the other hand is optimized to use Glide, therefor they have all the trouble optimizing it to a standard OpenGL for other models videocards than 3dfx and nVidia...

Thanks,

Jorden.

[Profit]

you used a GLwrapper written for the G200's to play Quake2 Glide thats how

HL is based on an extemely optimized Quake1 engine and it was primarily written for glide....so glide will run best with HL(won't look the best though)

[IceStorm]

I believe HL is a very heavily modified Q2 engine, not Q1. It is so heavily modified that there isn't all that much left of the original Q2 engine.

Having said that, yes, it "says" it's OpenGL, but that's not what it means. :-)

It was apparently written to the 3dfx miniGL. Rumor has it that the miniGL is actually a GLide wrapper, hence, the game was written around GLide, if you look at it from that perspective.

Confused yet?

Anywho, it runs slow for me when I use the ICD. When I use the TurboGL, it's much better. When I use my V2's, it's even faster.

Visually, I'm too busy killing things to care if the colors are "perfect". They certaintly are more vivid on the G400, even when I've got gamma tweaked out the ying-yang. But since multi is capped at 40FPS, I use whichever I feel is faster for the level - those big outdoor spaces put a serious load on the engine - dam is a sluggish level. Most other levels, especially gasworks, I prefer the better colors that the G400 offers. Since there's no longer a frame rate hit, I'll opt to use the G400 for most game outings.

The V2's do underwater murkyness, while the G400 seems to ignore this visual effect - not sure if I've got something set wrong or not.

I've been playing Redemption (single-player level add-on) at 1152x864 on the TurboGL, and I'm a happy camper.

[Fred]

Here is what I have...

PIII 450 oc to 558 (124/41)
Asus P3B-F
G400 vanilla MGATweak to (Sys PLL Clock) 295
128MB PC100 SDRAM
Couple of IDE HDD
Sony 5x DVD (haven't put in the Hollywood+ yet)
SB Live! Value
3com 3C509BT

I have Windows 98, not SE
Running 5.30 Drivers
SB Live version 3.0 (may go back to 2.1, more on that later)

I have been playing the following games
Unreal Tournament
Half-Life (Team Fortress Classic)
Freespace 2
Mechwarrior 3
Expendable (Bundled version)
Quake 3
Battlezone II demo..
Links LS 99

I have also been running 3D Winbench 99 and 3dMark 99 Max extensively. I only have the 3Dmark scores handy, 5502 3DMarks,8648 CPU 3DMarks.

I have had very few problems after removing the V2 and all associated drivers. Unreal runs very well, about 40fps @ 1024x768x32 with most things on. Things rarely lock up (less that once per evening usually, really, not that bad, I think). I t usually locks up after I switch from playing UT to TFC, or something like that. Considering the speed the RAM and PCI buses are running, I can't conclusively blame any specific piece of equipment. I think Liveware 3.0 may be a problem, I just installed it last night, get a GPF (I think) when loading AHTQB.EXE. I just got the system up and running, so I'll wait and see how it goes.

One thing to note, I noticed a thread on power supplies. I'm not saying this has anything to do with anything (but it may), but I have a 330W PS...

[willday]

I wrote:

I'm trying to run Half-Life at 1024 under the ICD and having no luck. As soon as I start to move, the screen seems to freeze and tear, and the machine hangs hard - reset button required.

Well, I figured this part out, at least. I was overclocking the 1024 res. Silly me. I had been playing with Matrox's tweak util, and naively assumed it wasn't overclocking if the utility wasn't running. Turned that off, and now it runs fine. Heh, go figure.

Running at 800 seems to at least run, but it gets noticeably slower in any halfway complex area (hallways and small rooms are fine; large rooms get jerky just standing in place and turning around).

I searched through the forums and found some of the tweaks (thanks for the reference to Kruzin's posts, IceStorm). The "gl_texsort 1" seemed to do the trick for opengl. The D3D, interestingly enough, didn't have the same performance problem; nor was it affected by the gl_texsort.

It was <a href="http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum5/HTML/004248.html">an interesting discussion</a> about the gl_texsort, and does seem to suggest a problem with the multitexturing. Although the discussion was mostly about 5.21 drivers, it seems to still be the case in 5.30. Wonder if they'll ever fix it...?

Both D3D and opengl had flickering decals, but seemed to require two different settings of gl_polyoffset; "-0.0001" for D3D and "0.5" for opengl. Setting either of them much larger made the decals show through walls; these seemed the best balance.

Overall, D3D seems just a tad faster, but it also seems noticeably less crisp, a little blurry somehow. I really like being able to keep the second desktop around, though. This may make me use D3D over the opengl.

Speaking of which, one of the things I'd read was that the TurboGL got around this; that is, that you can keep the second desktop running if you're using the TurboGL. Is this actually true? Can someone confirm (or deny) this?

[This message has been edited by willday (edited 29 October 1999).]