Interesting ICD Discovery

[Gurm]

So, just to put a real twist in Haig's knickers (sorry, Haig!), I figured I'd share this with the rest of the world (or the MURC anyway):

All three ICD's are code-compatible.

Yep, that's right. Whichever OS has the newest drivers, just yank the g400icd.dll and slap it into your machine. Cool, huh?

Now, to save y'all the trouble, the NT4 icd is some 19 days newer than the Win2k or Win9x ones. Hmm...

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Rags]

Yes, AFAIK the latest ICD's in the beta drivers are code compatible between one another. This is good news for people who have been complaining that win9x users get a better ICD than win2k/NT users get. Now that they are the same the are equally as great/bad.

Rags



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[DosFreak]

Yup, I noticed that when it first came out. I didn't post about it 'cause of what Rags just said.

[paulcs]

Let the hacking begin!

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[dZeus]

then how come the OpenGL fade modes work for Win9x, and not for win2k?

[Gurm]

dZeus:

That is a good question. However, there was a specific bug which affected the fade modes under NT OS's only... and we will likely see it fixed in upcoming driver releases.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[This message has been edited by Gurm (edited 06 August 2000).]

[Maggi]

Hi Guys.

Did anyone of you actually tried that ICD 'update' ?

If so, what were your experiences ?

Performance ?
Stabilitiy ?
Compatibility ?

Besides that this is an interesting discovery, Gurm !



Cheers,
Maggi

[Randy Simons]

Wow, it actually works! I've extracted the ICD for the G200 from the Win9X 6.01 drivers and used them on my W2K machine.
XTom3D doesn't has the Alphablending bug anymore.

It still is slooowww however.

Anyway, to do it: download the 6.01beta drivers from Matrox, extract them to a dir. Open a command prompt in the dir, and do

expand gx00icd.dl_ c:\gx00icd.dll (where X is 2 or 4)

Put the new file in your system-dir (after you backed up the old one) and ready!

I don't know if this will benefit you G400 very much, but it does for the G200 users (who haven't seen a driver update the last months...)

[This message has been edited by Randy Simons (edited 07 August 2000).]

[Gurm]

Glad to be of help, Randy!

Anyway, you can also do it with winzip... which is a bit easier than expanding it on the command line.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Randy Simons]

Winzip, naaa, WinRAR is all you need (winrar can extract cab-files, but not this one.. perhaps an old format)

[Gurm]

IIRC, those *.dl_ files (and anything else with an underscore as the last letter) are done up in a variation of LZH compression adopted by Microsoft.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Randy Simons]

Depends.. the CAB format actually supports several compress algorithms. One of them is named "MSZIP".

[RanDob]

Looks like Gurm is the only one who read my post at http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum4/HTML/004023.html

[This message has been edited by RanDob (edited 08 August 2000).]

[Darin]

Has the ICD ALWAYS been code compatible? Can I take the ICD .dll from the 6.x drivers & use them with a 5.x install (& visa versa)? Can I just keep changing out the .dll with different versions until I find one I like? I know that the 6.x powerdesk files are incompatible with the Matrox tweak program, but what if I just take the ICD from the newer drivers? And on that note, I haven't seen any mention of whether or not the new tweak utility works with the 6.x drivers (and if so, does it also work with the 5.x?). I prefer the Matrox utility because it "stays on" without having to add another program to the start-up group.

I'd also be interested to hear what icd people think is best for Q3A. I've heard a couple different answers, but I'm sure it's dependent on the machine. I'm running a P3 933 & Win98SE. I think I'm currently on the 5.52 driver set. I'd like to see if I can get rid of the texture problems (specifically the shadows & blast marks & some flashing), while not losing any speed (or hopefully gaining it).

TIA!!

[This message has been edited by Darin (edited 08 August 2000).]

[Stil]

They have been compatible for a while. Basically, you should be able to just use whichever ICD you find works best for you, and it doesn't matter what Windows you are running, and what version of the driver you installed.

Here's something else you might notice:

Applications that report the GL_VERSION string will tell you how old your ICD is. For example, when you run Quake 3, you can drop down the console, scroll up a ways, and see something like this:

GL_VERSION: 1.1.3 Jul 20 2000

That way you can tell if the ICD you are using is the "latest" one.