G400 Max OpenGL just does not work...

[VooDooD]

OK. I've formatted my machine and started again from scratch. I still cannot get the G400 MAX to do any kind of OpenGL. It either crashes my machine, or fails to find the hardware. I've tried Quake3, Half Life, Kingpin and SIN to no avail. I'm not using the second head either so that's not the problem. I'm at my wits end here as I've waited ages for the card and it's looking like a bit of a turkey. To top everything off, using 3DMark99, my old SLI Voodoo2 setup was loads faster.

Anyone have any ideas??

[VooDooD]

Oh... Forgot to mention hardware details. Running Windows98 and the 5.21 drivers by the way.

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Hardware Spec:

Dual P2-400 on QDI BX Mobo with onboard UW SCSI and 100Mb LAN
512Mb DRAM
4 x 4.5Gb UW SCSI HDD's
Matrox Millennium G400 Max
SBLive!
AOpen 6X DVD
AOpen 48X CDRom
Ricoh Storm CDRW
Connor 4Gb DAT
LS120 and ZIP
Hitachi Accuvue 21"
IBM P200 20"
Microsoft DSS80

[Scout255]

i got the exactam
same problem, except it won't run any opengl, and i get 10-15 frames/second in d3d...
plus the fact i get blue screen's of death every 10-15 minutes (didn't happen with old card)

[burre burrito]

This seems to be a very common problem, with G400 and Half-life. I can play MP with D3D and it works good enough, but with OGL I get fps on 10 when wpoly goes over 600. That just sucks. I get about 25 under the same conditions when playing with D3D. Now that I know that I'm not alone, I will now SCREAM FOR HELP!!! What shall I do? These things never happened with my V2... HELP US ALL!!!

[Kruzin]

Burrito - Your problem was figured out the other day in the hardware forum. Add:
gl_texsort "1"
to your autoexec.cfg, and you should see a greatly increased framerate in HL.

Other guys:
There's obviously a hardware conflict, or possible a defective card.

A couple things to make sure of:
-G400 should be on an IRQ by itself (with an IRQ holder)
-All Matrox products prefer higher IRQs (9 or above)
-3D only works in 16 or 32 bit color depths

Other things to try:
-Raise graphics aperture to 256meg
-Turn off caching options in bios
-Slow down RAM timings
-Clock to normal speeds if overclocking
-Boot into safe mode and look in device manager to make sure there are no duplicate/errant drivers in there
-Put the card in a different PC for testing, in case it is a defective card

[Scout255]

which cacheing should be disbled?
my matrox card is on irq 10 w/ irq holder
network card 9
and i am not sure what my sound card is on and i am not overclocking the vid card either....

[VooDooD]

Cheers Kruzin... You solved my problem.

My bios wasn't assigning an IRQ to the card, it was cacheing the bios and only had a 64Mb AGP aperture.

Everythings working fine and dandy now.

[Kruzin]

VooDooD-
Glad that got you going.
It was almost certainly the lack of an IRQ assignment in your case...those other settings can be played with till it works best for you.

Scout - I made some suggestions in the hardware forum about your IRQs and drivers.
As far as overclocking, I wasn't just reffering to the video card. If anything is being overclocked, it's always a good idea to clock all components to spec for troubleshooting.

[burre burrito]

Hello
I have had problems with HL OGL. It might be the "AGP aparture" thingy... how do I change that? that is the only thing i dont know what it is of all thesuggestions i have red here....

[burre burrito]

THANK YOU CRUZIN!!!! That solved it!!! Now i get 'bout 25 fps instead of 10 Thanx a lot!

still, i dont know that my AGP aparture is put on, or how i can check/change it. Please, help.

HW Spec:
P2 350 MHz
3*32 SDRAM
4 Mb HD
Matrox G400 32 Mb card, dualhead (disabled)
ESS Audio card
Sony 32x CD-ROM
CTX 17" monitor

[Kruzin]

AGP aperture size in an option in most (but not all) BIOSes.

It is usually fine at 64meg, on some systems it needs to be bumped up, but in those cases, the machine usually won't even boot up.

You probably don't need to worry about it, unless you want to try different settings for performance...but it usually doesn't make much difference there...

[Scout255]

Yes kruzin, i am overclocking my printer
hehe, j/k...
but seriously, currently i am not

[bongo]

HI there

Saw some of your statements in the MURCS forum from above here.

You stated "Raise graphics aperture to 256meg
-Turn off caching options in bios"

Where do I raise the graphics apeture....in the windows properties..device?

Also, where do I turn off caching options bios, on motherboard setup during
bottup or in windows..where please..

thanks

[Lag]

Well, to set agp aperture to 256... when your computer boots up It says like, press F1 for setup or press del for setup, something like that, that will get you into your bios where you can change your agp ap size.