Problems and disappointment with G400 so far!!

[David Moscrop]

Since buying my G400 32mb S/H, I have had nothing but problems regarding frame rates and getting OpenGL games to work!
First of all FIFA2000 performance under D3D was worse than my Voodoo2, and Unreal Tournament is slower than my mates Voodoo3 with the same spec machine. I am however not totally disheartened because of the infancy of the drivers, and the fact that I will be upgrading my CPU to an Athlon 650 soon. Its just that since the start of 3D acceleration I have used the 3dfx range and was somewhat reluctant when choosing my G400. I went with it however expecting it to be on at least a par with a Voodoo3; not the case as my friends same spec machine shows me.
I am also getting dumped back to my desktop in 640x480 in ALL openGL games ie Q3a, UT, Kingpin. I have tried all the suggestions regarding BIOS settings, AGP aperture size, desktop res and colour depth, IRQ settings. I have also tried all the card, PD and TurboGL drivers but to no avail.
I am happy to stick with my G400 hoping that newer drivers will come out but Im just a bit frustrated at the moment.
Any suggestions on my situation or thoughts on increasing frame rates in UT would be great. Thanks

Spec:
Pentium II 350, Abit BH6 m/b, 128mb RAM
G400 AGP 32mb S/H, IBM Titan II 13.5gb H/D
SB Live 1024 value, 6x DVD, 36x CDROM
56K PCI modem, PCI TV tuner, 17" Monitor

[Maggi]

Hi David,

you should provide your complete system specs to us if you want us to help you out.

[MegaManX4]

My UT Probs (slow Performance, really slow 4-8 fps) were solved with a nifty little Trick. The only thing was upgrading to PD 5.41 and to set the Apareture Size to 256 (maybe because I have 192 MB). And all my Problems gone! Except the TGL....

Thomas


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K6-3 400Mhz@450Mhz
G400 16MB, 192MB Ram and so on

[paulcs]

The V3 loves Unreal engine games, and the G400 likes a fast processor. Your decision to upgrade is a good one; you'll see a nice jump in framerates.

I don't think your OpenGL problems have anything to do with immature drivers. You should be able to run these games at respectable speeds right now. I think you're having a conflict or a hardware issue of some sort.

Firstly, make sure the *second* version of the TurboGL drivers are installed properly in your game directories.

Make sure your board is properly seated in the AGP slot. This can be extremely tricky. It looks like it's in there, but sometimes when you screw in the plate, the board becomes slightly misaligned. Give it a good push.

The G400 likes IRQ 9 or higher and it doesn't like to share.

Make sure you're using the latest Soundblaster Live drivers. There are conflicts with older drivers.

Set your AGP aperture size at 256.

Make sure you have removed all traces of old videocard drivers and registry entries. If there are still traces of 3dfx stuff in your machine and games, you're bound to have problems.

It's a good idea to use D3D when playing UT. The OpenGL implementation is poor. (I think the game's manufacturer refers to it as "experimental.")

Good luck. If you continue having problems, as mentioned before, post more detailed specs and your IRQ's.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Strider]

Due to your processor (rather low for a G400) it is not surprising to see a Vodoo card running a glide game outperforming the G400 under D3D especially if you are comparing at resolutions below 1024. This is definately the case with UT (is FIFA2000 a glide game as well?). A more powerfull processor will help out.

As for the openGL games, something is certainly not right. If your G400 is on an irq 9 or higher and not conflicting with anything else, I suspect a problem with old 3dfx files or the sound card. Do a search for *3dfx*.* and remove any files you find outside of game directories. I would also recommend that you use powerdesk 5.3 so you don't have to worry about turbogl (once you can get opengl going, you can try turbogl). You might also want to reinstall one of the openGL games once you eliminated old 3dfx files and changed the drivers.

If that doesn't do it, check the sound card. There is a conflict between G400 and the SB Live software. I believe the fix is to install the latest software.

[Fyrespray]

To be fair its not really surprising that your UT framerates are so much worse than a V3 because UT is built on a glide engine. It performs poorly for every card but a voodoo as its DirectX and OpenGL code is well below par. I know people with GeForce/TNT2U and various other cards and they all get poor performance in UT unless they use a voodoo, its the game not your G400 that is to blame. Try loading up Q3 and comparing it to your mates V3 you should then give him a nasty shock as your frame rates beat his and he drools over the eye candy his card cannot hope to compete with : )

Fyrespray


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Celery 366 @ 550,Abit BM6, 128Mb PC100 Ram, G200 8Mb, AWE64 Gold, Win98SE.



[This message has been edited by Fyrespray (edited 05 January 2000).]

[David Moscrop]

Thanks to all of the suggestions.
I have finally got the OpenGL games to work. I reset the BIOS to the default settings. There was an option called Assign IRQ to VGA which was disabled! I should have picked up on this earlier! I installed PD 5.3 and the games worked.
I must say I was well impressed with Quake3 Arena, the frame rates were great.
I also mentioned about FIFA 2000, and I have since found out that there are major problems with the 3d implementation of the game.
Thanks to all of your help. Its greatly appreciated!

[Maggi]

HI John,

is that game OpenGL or D3D based ?

[JohnM]

NBA 2000 doesn't seem to work right either with my G400 Max.


It worked fine with the Herc TNT2 Ultra that I replaced, with the Max it will only run in software mode.