Please someone HELP. My G400 either funs horribly or NOT AT ALL!?!?!?!?

[Informant X]

Ok i just got the G400 OEM, 32 meg card single head.

Here is my system
Soyo's sys 6-vba-133 mobo apollo pro 133 chipest
466 Celeron
128 Meg of PC100 Generic Ram
Maxtor 13.6 Gig hd, 7200 rpm, 2meg, ata66
Soundblaster 16 ISA sound card
Diamond ISA 56k Modem
HP IDE CD Burner
40x cdrom

Ok i just got this card and i put it in and used the shippin drivers. I then played q3 and the framerate was horrible. It was like 11 fps which was worse than my old STB Velocity 8 Meg vid card. (This is at 640x480x16bit) That is bad, there is no way it can be worse than the STB. Then i played ut also at the same color depth and resolution. I got 25 to 10 fps, in there it was bad. Now i got the new 5.4 drivers installed err i tried to install them and during installing it it asked for 2 files. The pdeskcmd.exe and readeng.txt files from disk. So i assumed they would be on the original drivers cd and they weren't. I did a find to try to find them on the cd and there weren't there. So where are these files supposed to come from? So i had to skip them. Then i installed the Turbogl files and they installed fine. Now i try to run Q3 and it don't work. I start it and then the game switches resolution then dumps me back to the desktop. UT runs at the same crappy speeds. I have DX7 installed too. What am i supposed to do? Please help me out. I tried setting the AGP aperature to 256 but it only goes as high as 128. Why is my performance so bad?

------------------
Out with the new, in with the old

[tony mathis]

download and install the 5.30 drivers and the turbogl drivers.

[Thundrchez]

That SB 16 ISA is going to eat a LOT of your cpu cycles as it does software wave table emulation. Upgrade it to a SB Live Value.

As a quick test, try turning off the audio and take a look at what your refresh rate is. The SB-Live series is very low overhead on your cpu.

[paulcs]

If you haven't updated your VIA drivers in the last month, you should do so. New 4in1 drivers were posted very recently.

As Tony suggested, you should download PD 5.30, as they seem to work much better with VIA chipsets. Also, download and install version 2 of TurboGL.

First, uninstall the 5.41 drivers using Matrox's uninstaller program. (This should be downloaded as well.)

In VGA mode, install the VIA 4in1 drivers (if you haven't already).

Then install PowerDesk 5.30 by running the Setup program. Do not use the inf.

Set your AGP aperture to 256 Mb as Matrox suggests.

Thundrchez's assessment of your soundcard situation, as far as I've heard, is true. If you decide to upgrade your soundcard to a Soundblaster Live, *absolutely* do not use the shipping drivers. Download the latest drivers from Creative's website before installing the board.

Just a suggestion. If you buy a device that's been out for a while, I find it best to avoid the drivers that ship with it. They can be extremely old and buggy.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[athlet]

I have a soundblaster AWE 64 Value ISA and my framerate is really good (k7-500/g400). So do you guys think i could get some more FPS just by changing to a Soundblaster Live! (Value) ?

That sounds strange ?!

[Kruzin]

I saw a 10-15% fps increase in all games when I went from my AWE64 to my Live!value...not to mention the sound is 10X better....

[Rags]

Hi athlet,

Try benchmarking with sound off, and you will get an idea of how much the upgrade will improve your framerates, because the Live! is really close to not having sound on as far as performance goes.

Rags

[Thundrchez]

The AWE64 does have hardware wavetable support, so it is worlds better than a SB16. The 10-15% performance increase that Kruzin mentioned is accurate, so there is still a lot to be gained by going to a Live.

Try playing something without audio to see for yourself.

[Informant X]

Where are the Via 4in1 drivers? Like where can i find them. Is that a bios update or something? Or something like it? And where is TurboGL 2? Sorry for being so ignant.
Thanks for the help!!

[Wombat]

VIA's sites are at:
http://www.viatech.com (US site)
http://www.via.com.tw (Taiwan site)

On the right site of the page, there is a menu selector that says "Site Index". Click on it, and go the the "Drivers" area. The 4-in-1 is very easy to see from there.

[paulcs]

You can get the VIA 4in1 drivers here. They are not at BIOS flash, just drivers for your non-Intel chipset.
http://www.via.com.tw/drivers/

They include drivers for IDE Busmastering, the VIA AGP Driver, IRQ Routing Driver, VIA ACPI Registry. VIA claims you don't need some of them if you're using Windows 98 Second Edition, but if you're using the first version, you should install them all. Just follow the instructions and you should be fine.

As for the newer TurboGL, the Uninstaller, 5.30, etc., you can get everything here at MURC.
http://www.murc.ws

There are links on MURC's homepage.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Informant X]

Ok i have just installed the 4in1 drivers and now ut fps ranges from 40-15fps (640x480x16) Quake three now does not dump me back to the desktop instead it freezes at a black screen. I am gonna try the 5.3 drivers tommorow. Also the agp aperature thing. I only have 128 ram but most people say to set it to 256. I would do that my bios won't let me go past 128. Is that ok? Thanks. Any other suggestionsJ? Should i uprade my bios too?

[tony mathis]

there is a newer version of the agp driver than the one in the 4in1 patch. i got mine at www.epox.com the drivers will really help.

------------------
Einstien"not"

[Io]

I've an SS7 based system as well, though using P5A with 128 Mb.. as far as I know setting your AGP texture size to more than what you have for your physical memory will not really help. Certain cases, if I'm not wrong, you might actually get a performance hit (but seems to me it happens mostly to those that o/c'ed their systems..)

I've set mine to 256 Mb texture size whislt having only abt 128 Mb on-board RAM, 3dmark2k just indicated my total texture ram as being just slightly more than 130 Mb..

How this works still, I dont really know.

[Wombat]

Just remember, you should reinstall VIA's AGP patch every time you change your DirectX install, or your video drivers. A lot of people forget to do that, and it can cause problems.