Geforce256 running faster than Geforce2 GTS?!

Hi again people,

Sorry to have to start yet another Geforce related thread but I’ve got a wierd problem with my current OpenGl app. Its drawing about 250’000 Polygons using eight display lists(using GL_COMPILE once then just calling gldrawlist to draw them).

It normally rips allong nicly (50+ FPS) on my humble GeForce256 32MB DDR (P3-800 256 RAM 100Mhz system bus AGPx4) yet on my mates machine with a GeForce2 GTS 32MB (P3-800 128 RAM 133 System Bus AGPx4) it totally crawls along (6-8 FPS) any ideas what could be causing this both machines are using Windows 2000 Pro + SP1? And both are using detonator 6.3.1.0 drivers!

I’m not using any nvidia extensions or anything just nice simple display lists as have been discussed previosally on this board. Theres no lighting no textures just polygons and colours. Is their some mode I have to enable for the Geforce2 GTS to get it to speed up with display lists or some other point I’m missing? Its got me completly stumped…

Cheers,

Convict@Large

Originally posted by convict@large:
It normally rips allong nicly (50+ FPS) on my humble GeForce256 32MB DDR (P3-800 256 RAM 100Mhz system bus AGPx4) yet on my mates machine with a GeForce2 GTS 32MB (P3-800 128 RAM 133 System Bus AGPx4) it totally crawls along (6-8 FPS) any ideas what could be causing this both machines are using Windows 2000 Pro + SP1? And both are using detonator 6.3.1.0 drivers!

For starters, with a poly count that large in display lists, it may be the fact that your machine happens to have 256 meg of ram and the other having only 128 meg. Not sure what bearing this may have, but its worth checking into.

Siwko

I’ve checked that out and task manager only reports the use of about 32megs of ram on either system so that would seem to rule that out…

What chipset do the systems have?

I’m guessing we are running out of AGP memory and thus falling back to a slower way of handling the display lists.

It is very difficult to guess how much AGP memory is available on a system. Sometimes there is a good 20 MB of it, sometimes we try to allocate 512K and fail!

I assume that if you swap the cards you get the same results? That is, the problem is system-dependent, not card-dependent?

  • Matt

I had this problem with almost identical performance difference; most likely you’ve enabled full screen antialiasing by accident. It might even have been the default when you installed the card.

Hope that helps.

Hes not got anti-aliasing on.

But I’ve ran Nvidias AGP apature size dection program and it comes up as using all the aviable ram on my machine (256 RAM + 1GB VRAM) wheres on the Geforce2 gts system it comes up as 0 RAM + 0 VRAM.

So that would seem to settle the question of what the problem is, I’m going to try and get a bios update for his machine to see if that fixes it. But its using an Apollo 4xAGP chipset and I’m running the Intel 820…

Cheers,

Convict@Large

There are so many VIA chipset bugs I wouldn’t know where to start…

The first thing is definitely to make sure that the BIOS and the GART driver are up to date, and that the OS is set up properly for AGP, but I don’t know enough about this stuff beyond that to give more advice. I just use BX and it always works.

  • Matt

Your problem is that Microsoft does not properly support VIA chipsets on Win2K. There is a patch on the MS site (preliminary) that should enable AGP memory. I used keywords AGP VIA in their knowledgebase to find it. worked for me Apallo based board.

Cheers for that I’ll defintely check it out and see if I can get it to work.

Cheers,

Daniel

While we are on the subject of AGP memory in Windows 2000, I would like to add my few cents worth:

When installing windows 2000, I used drivers version 6.3.1. Running Nvidia’s AGP memory program reported that my Geforce2 GTS 32MB had 32MB of AGP memory…

Then I installed service pack 1. Now when I run Nvidia’s AGP memory program it reports 0 of 0, like is described above. AGP memory is NOT being used…

My system is:
Elsa Geforce2 GTS 32MB
Tyan Thunder 2400 (i840 Chipset)
256MB RAM
AGP 4x, Aperature size set to 128MB

Thats VERY interesting as We’ve both got Service Pack 1 installed on our machines as well and mine still gives the correct readouts on the amount of memory aviable. Perhaps its something that happens to non-intel chipsets?

Daniel

u might wanna try your motherboard’s website for agp ‘drivers/converters?’ i had the same problem ie agpmem=0

Only problem I have is that the i840 is “supported by drivers included with the Windows 2000 operating system”

Hi,

I also got 0 mb of agp memory in win2k.
I’m using a geforce2-32mb, 256mb ram, 800mhz athlon and a asus a7v mainboard. I haven’t installed the service pack for win2k but I have updated all drivers and bios: es for my hardware, what to do?

// Spark

Have you tried the patch Techmage suggested from the microsoft website?

Daniel

I couldn’t locate the path at microsoft’s knowledge base, does anyone have a direct link to the file or something?

search with VIA and AGP as your keywords and you should get it.

http://www.microsoft.com/WINDOWS2000/downloads/recommended/q261606/default.asp

Sure, that might explain the problem with VIA chipsets, but what about with the Intel i840?