New bios causes stuttering in Unreal Tournament

[franksch3]

Hi all,

this time it's me with a problem. My G400 and all other hardware have worked correctly with my cheap GVC QS440BX motherbord with Award bios.

However the time has come to upgrade my processor to a Pentium III. It won't be a Athlon as it requires a new expensive motherbord. But for that I have to upgrade my Award bios from version 1.0 to 1.63.

However, with that new BIOS Unreal Tournament has enormous stutters and when it is getting crowded it gets unplayable, while it isn't with bios version 1.0.

Maybe someone here has the same motherbord or might have some indication which might be the problem or solution. I have tried all the BIOS tricks like 256 MB AGP Aperture, disable shadow of video bios, disable caching of video bios and memory. Those don't seem to solve the problem.

The G400 doesn't share a IRQ, it has IRQ 11 nice and lonely. ;-) However, my Sound Blaster Live shares it's IRQ with two other devices (IRQ 10) so that might be the problem. I'll certainly move it to another PCI slot and see what happens.

I remember something I read here about a problem with the SB Live and G400 problem, but I can't remember it anymore. Maybe someone has some hints?

With regards
Frank Schoondermark

[franksch3]

Come on guys, don't leave me in the cold here, after being (and still being) such a nice, satisfied G400 dualhead user. ;-)

[Wombat]

Have you updated the Live! drivers? I don't have one myself, but I remember that a lot of people's G400 problems went away when they upgraded the drivers for the Live!.
However, getting the Live! an IRQ of its own is also a good idea. Let's see what you have on your interrupts, and we'll play the little game of freeing them.

[franksch3]

I seem to have forgotten the one basic rule for a gamer:

"Always make sure you have the latest drivers!"

I have the live for only one week and thought that the drivers for liveware 3 were the newest ones, but that was wrong. They released new drivers for november.

Downloaded those drivers and the problems went away, even giving me 2 fps more in Quake 3 benchmarks (with sound on ofcourse). OK, it's only 2 fps, but it's better than hing. ;-)

So, it seems to be a driver problem of the live, somehow conflicting with my new bios release. OK, now I can think about a PIII. ;-)