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Video card aggravations


Steve Scrimpshire
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Ok, so I had an eVGA GF4 MX440 (4x AGP 64 MB DDR), but wound up having to put it in another system I was building for someone else.

So, I ordered a Chaintech MX4000 GF4 (8x AGP 128 MB DDR).

 

eVGA (old card) glxgears, default window size with NVAGP 4x --------> 1800+ FPS

Chaintech (new card) glxgears, default window size with NVAGP 8x -> ~1000 FPS

 

Why exactly is this? Asus a7v600 board which supports 8x AGP, FastWrites and SBA. I've rechecked the BIOS and it has it set up right there. Did I gain anything by getting this 'better' card???

 

BTW, I've tried with and without FW or SBA enabled...same basic results, except disabling SBA gives me noticably slower FPS.

Edited by Steve Scrimpshire
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Have you enabled FW and SBA in the nvidia module itself, or just in your BIOS?

 

On my Gentoo box I had to edit /etc/modules.d/nvidia and enable them.

 

I had a similar problem with an AOpen GF4 (on exactly the same MoBo). It turned out that the manufacturer just made crap cards... I thought they were all the same, but they ain't.

 

EDIT: Not at my box now, that file may be somewhere else...

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[omar@desktop omar]$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status

Status:          Enabled

Driver:          NVIDIA

AGP Rate:        8x

Fast Writes:    Enabled

SBA:            Enabled

 

Enabled. I thought Chaintech made good stuff, though.

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nvidia model names, on the whole, suck. MX4000 certainly isn't much better than the MX440, and it may well be worse. I *seem* to remember it was basically the 440 stuck on an 8X interface (which is bloody pointless, because it isn't capable of transferring enough data to saturate a 4X interface in any case) and renamed, but it might be a bit different. Half the number does seem low, though. Try turning fastwrites and SBA *off*, and tweaking the nvidia driver AGP setting (see nvidia documentation).

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Right, but, IIRC, 1800 FPS in a default glxgears window translates to roughly 32 fps fullscreen at 1024x768, so 1000 would suck.

 

And, yes I've tried turning FW and SBA off. I really haven't tried tweaking agp...other than throttling it to 4x, whcih my other card was to see if that was it.

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I hate to say this man, but I think you've just got a crap card. My AOpen GF4 MX440 wouldn't give me over 500FPS in glxgears (ok, this was a really crap card, I've seen other 440s do around 800), so if your card is based on the famously crap MX440 (a friend of mine had a GF2 that performed better) then I don't think there's anything that can be done, except getting a better card. I tried _everything_ with my 440 before giving up and buying a FX5700 - instantly my fps in glxgears shot up to 3200 8)

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Well, I think it's possible that this is a crap card and/or just a bad egg...but, we've had another Chaintech card here we tried to use in another computer that was also crappy/buggy, even in Windows. I thought the first was just a bad luck card, because the Chaintech name, but apparently they all suck. Currently, since installing this card, X runs at 100% cpu also and locks my system up when it crashes or if I kill it. Hopefully, I can RMA it and get another card.

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I copied this from my email to my local LUG, so some of this is info is a repeat:

Hi guys,

 

I'm using MDK 10.1 with kernel-2.6.8.1-24mdk. I just got a Chaintech MX4000 128 MB DDR 8x agp card for my Asus a7v600. I'm using the NVidia 6106 driver (I'm pretty sure). My old card was an eVga mx440se 64MB DDR 4x agp card. Running glxgears with the default window size with the old card I was getting ~1800fps (I know that's not a true measure of performance at the default window size, but humor me). The new card will only get ~1000fps, same situation. I've tried it with and without Fast-Writes and Side Band Addressing enabled and with the agpgart module and the nvagp module (not at the same time of course). Here's the kicker: I came home from the meeting to find my box locked up. Only way to shut it down was to power off. I don't mean the screen was frozen...the monitor was asleep and would not wake up and I could not ssh into the box like I normally can with lockups caused by the nvidia driver.

So, I boot it back up and run gkrellmd on it. I connect to the gkrellm daemon from my laptop and see that cpu usage is at 100%. I run top and see that X is using 99.7% cpu. I kill it with top and *wham*...box locks up. This is the same nvidia driver that I was using with the old card, but I had to compile it against a new kernel, because when I got low fps, I tried to update it to the latest nvidia driver, which wouldn't work and then could not reinstall the old driver on the old kernel, so I upgraded the kernel and installed the old driver. 

What do you think the problem may be?

 

TIA

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