BIOS settings?

[Paul C]

Just got the G400MAX, great card. Just wondering about some BIOS settings, I have a Gigabyte BX2000.

Should these be enabled or disabled.
1. Video BIOS
2. Video Cache
3. Video Shadow(?)

I have got the latest Powerdesk installed (5.52), do I need to install this TurboGL?

[Nuno]

Disabled.

5.52 ICD is pretty speedy (although I used 5.50 because 5.52 has some graphical glitches in q3). Install tgl, compare and then decide

[This message has been edited by Nuno (edited 10 April 2000).]

[gbm]

All enabled.
Look up my website for some discussion of these.

[TTCharon]

To gbm:

In what part of your site???

[Jorden]

Ofcourse I don't doubt gbm's view on these things, but the official way ( ) to do things is:

- PCI/VGA Palette Snoop - Disabled
- Video ROM BIOS Shadow - Disabled
- Video RAM Shadow - Disabled
- C8000 - DFFFF - All memory ranges should be Disabled.
- AGP Aperture Size - 256, or Half of your total amount of main system RAM. However you should try different settings.
- Video Memory Cache Size - UC
- Assign IRQ to VGA - YES

(from Matrox FAQs)

Jorden.


[This message has been edited by Jorden (edited 13 April 2000).]

[The PIT]

Or if in doubt benchmark before and after and see if it makes a differeance. General I disable them.

[gbm]

He, he...

ROM shadow:
No PCI/AGP card could ever initialize with ROM shadow disabled. This option SHOULD influence only ISA cards. The mystery is: this option does SOMETHING, but surely it doesn't control the shadowing.

Video BIOS caching:
Speeds up the DOS applications, doesn't hurt anyone else. No reason to keep it disabled.

Video RAM caching:
AFAIK, the video memory is never cached, so this option is another mystery. I assume that "enabled" means "write combining enabled", which is of course recommended for contemporary hardware. Matrox drivers enable WC on K6 CPUs (there is no WC option in K6 BIOSes).

[CannyOne]

Cool! I guess I'll just have to play the guy from Missouri. I'll have to make some changes and see the effect for myself. But thanks for the discussion!

PS. I just realized with the last post, that I finally made MURCer statis! Woohoo! (And NO! the majority of my posts weren't little comments like this one.) I really think everyone here is "the greatest"!!

[CannyOne]

Well, I tried some different things and this is the result, with an EPoX 7KXA motherboard and Athlon 750. Enabling "Video BIOS & RAM caching" has no effect, either positive or negative. However, when I disabled the "Video ROM Shadowing", I began to have consistant lockups, in the particular game I was using to measure performance. It stumped me at first because I also tried using 32-bit rendering at a lower resolution. I then switched back to 16-bit and still encountered the same "lockup". After, re-enabling the shadowing things function as before. It bugs me as to "why" this is the case! But, the bottom line is "what works". Take care all! I'm going back to my game, which was adversely interupted by my curiosity.