HL2 and 9800 pro.

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati (More info?)

Hello I have a Powercolour 9800 pro graphics card and for some reason after
about 1 hour play of HL2 the computer just locks up, I don't think the card
is overheating as I can run 3dmark05 for about 10 hours non stop with no
crashes or lockups, could it be the new ati drivers using the NGO ATI
optimised driver based around the catylst 5.7s.
Anyone experienced this as its really annoying when getting into HL2 then
suddenly boom! locks up

TIA.

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati (More info?)

"abc" <a@b.c> wrote in message news:42ecaa6d$0$11913$5a62ac22@per-qv1-newsreader-01.iinet.net.au...
>
> "Lee" <leecomp@REMOVETHISblueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:ei9pe1deungqnvk8ndtetm1fn02ljeodai@4ax.com...
> > Hello I have a Powercolour 9800 pro graphics card and for some reason
> > after
> > about 1 hour play of HL2 the computer just locks up, I don't think the
> > card
> > is overheating as I can run 3dmark05 for about 10 hours non stop with no
> > crashes or lockups, could it be the new ati drivers using the NGO ATI
> > optimised driver based around the catylst 5.7s.
> > Anyone experienced this as its really annoying when getting into HL2 then
> > suddenly boom! locks up
> >
> > TIA.
>
> I only had one lockup with HL2, but that was with earlier drivers and I
> haven't played it since.
>
> I have a similar problem with Battlfield 2 demo (5.6/5.7 ATI drivers)
> though. I left it long enough once and it reported an infinite loop error.
> No other games do this, so it could be the ATI drivers, or hardware failing.
>
> I am going to try the full version of BF2 and see what happens.
>
> Good luck with it.

A memory leak problem was reported starting with Catalyst
5.x (don't remember which version exactly, it could have been
5.2 or 5.3). Try reverting to a known good version (4.12
WHQL) and see if the problem goes away.

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati (More info?)

On Sun, 31 Jul 2005 06:00:37 -0500, "Colin Wilson"
<colin@wilsonc-no-spam.demon.co.uk> wrote:


>
>I'm now at that bit where those freedom-fighter muppets try to 'help'.
>Hmm. Maybe I should just shoot the lot of them!

Unfortunately, you can't. I actually wrote the only e-mail I've ever
written to a game developer because of the "friendly" NPC AI. A
blemish on what was an otherwise perfect game.Villain

"Bravery is not a function of firepower"
-J.C. Denton-

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati (More info?)

For me, setting the AGP speed to 8x causes lockups in Doom3, HL2, and
Battlefield 2. Setting it to 4x solved the problem in all three cases. Might
be worth a try.

You can set it as low as 2x without suffering performance degradation, as
seen here:
http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=554

--
"War is the continuation of politics by other means.
It can therefore be said that politics is war without
bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."


"Lee" <leecomp@REMOVETHISblueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message
news:ei9pe1deungqnvk8ndtetm1fn02ljeodai@4ax.com...
> Hello I have a Powercolour 9800 pro graphics card and for some reason
> after
> about 1 hour play of HL2 the computer just locks up, I don't think the
> card
> is overheating as I can run 3dmark05 for about 10 hours non stop with no
> crashes or lockups, could it be the new ati drivers using the NGO ATI
> optimised driver based around the catylst 5.7s.
> Anyone experienced this as its really annoying when getting into HL2 then
> suddenly boom! locks up
>
> TIA.

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati (More info?)

I ended up doing that, but it still locked on 5.7 drivers. Went back to 5.2
and everything seems OK.
All other games till now worked fine for me except Battlefield 2.

I really hate having to turn down the AGP speed because someone somewhere
can't write more robust software.

Like being told you can't use 4th gear on your car, because the engine might
stop...

"First of One" <daxinfx@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:kZednZ6MluVXunDfRVn-qw@rogers.com...
> For me, setting the AGP speed to 8x causes lockups in Doom3, HL2, and
> Battlefield 2. Setting it to 4x solved the problem in all three cases.
> Might be worth a try.
>
> You can set it as low as 2x without suffering performance degradation, as
> seen here:
> http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=554
>
> --
> "War is the continuation of politics by other means.
> It can therefore be said that politics is war without
> bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."
>
>
> "Lee" <leecomp@REMOVETHISblueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:ei9pe1deungqnvk8ndtetm1fn02ljeodai@4ax.com...
>> Hello I have a Powercolour 9800 pro graphics card and for some reason
>> after
>> about 1 hour play of HL2 the computer just locks up, I don't think the
>> card
>> is overheating as I can run 3dmark05 for about 10 hours non stop with no
>> crashes or lockups, could it be the new ati drivers using the NGO ATI
>> optimised driver based around the catylst 5.7s.
>> Anyone experienced this as its really annoying when getting into HL2 then
>> suddenly boom! locks up
>>
>> TIA.
>
>

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati (More info?)

First of One wrote:
> AGP8x is of absolutely zero performance benefit, as seen from the Sudhian
> benchmarks. There's no reason to even *want* to run at 8x, aside from
> perhaps padding up 3DMark scores.

Some people claim that games are loading about 50% faster with 8xAGP
compared to 4xAGP because textures are transferred faster to vram. Don't
know about the difference myself because I have always kept AGP at 8x...

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati (More info?)

Nope, just tried it. Ran Doom3 v1.3 Demo1 with a console command suffix
(like "timedemo demo1 b" ) so it precaches the textures at the beginning of
the demo. Precaching occurs after the demo is loaded from the hard drive, so
disk performance has no influence. I then timed the precaching duration with
a stopwatch.

AGP 4x:
11 sec
11 sec
11 sec

AGP 8x:
11 sec
11 sec
11 sec

No difference. I'm running 2x 512 MB dual-channel DDR400 on a Soltek K8TPro
Socket 939 board, so the system RAM interface is not the bottleneck. Fast
Writes and SBA are enabled in both cases.

--
"War is the continuation of politics by other means.
It can therefore be said that politics is war without
bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."


"de Moni" <demonimummFILTER@mail.com> wrote in message
newscnube$bek$1@phys-news1.kolumbus.fi...
> Some people claim that games are loading about 50% faster with 8xAGP
> compared to 4xAGP because textures are transferred faster to vram. Don't
> know about the difference myself because I have always kept AGP at 8x...

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati (More info?)

On Tue, 2 Aug 2005 16:31:05 +0000 (UTC), Winfried Magerl
<winfried.magerl@mch.sbs.de> wrote:

>In article <dcnube$bek$1@phys-news1.kolumbus.fi>,
>de Moni <demonimummFILTER@mail.com> wrote:
>>First of One wrote:
>>> AGP8x is of absolutely zero performance benefit, as seen from the Sudhian
>>> benchmarks. There's no reason to even *want* to run at 8x, aside from
>>> perhaps padding up 3DMark scores.
>>
>>Some people claim that games are loading about 50% faster with 8xAGP
>>compared to 4xAGP because textures are transferred faster to vram. Don't
>>know about the difference myself because I have always kept AGP at 8x...
>
>the bandwith of AGP4 is about 1GByte/s. In theory this should fill 256MByte
>graphic-memory in 0.25 seconds. Using AGP8 could fill it in 0.125 seconds
>so in theory, games should realy load faster with AGP8. Unfortunatly I never
>see a game loading that fast ;-)
>
>regards
>
> winfried


Clearly First of One's loading times were not sufficiently accurately
clocked, then. They should have read:

AGP 4x:
11.125 sec
11.125 sec
11.125 sec

AGP 8x:
11 sec
11 sec
11 sec

Pretty earthshaking improvement when you look at it that way! ;-)

Patrick

<patrickp@5acoustibop.co.uk> - take five to email me...

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati (More info?)

Isn't AGP capable of xferring a LOT more data than even dual-channel at
200Mhz? Even with dual-channel, at 200 Mhz the maximum theoretical bandwidth
is 200Mhz * 8bytes or 1600Mbytes/sec. The theoretical bandwidth for AGP 8x
is 533Mhz * 4 bytes or 2128Mbytes/sec. Therefore your RAM is definitely
bottlenecking at AGP 8x.

--
there is no .sig
"First of One" <daxinfx@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:n_WdnRFnM6e6FXLfRVn-3Q@rogers.com...
> Nope, just tried it. Ran Doom3 v1.3 Demo1 with a console command suffix
> (like "timedemo demo1 b" ) so it precaches the textures at the beginning of
> the demo. Precaching occurs after the demo is loaded from the hard drive,
> so disk performance has no influence. I then timed the precaching duration
> with a stopwatch.
>
> AGP 4x:
> 11 sec
> 11 sec
> 11 sec
>
> AGP 8x:
> 11 sec
> 11 sec
> 11 sec
>
> No difference. I'm running 2x 512 MB dual-channel DDR400 on a Soltek
> K8TPro Socket 939 board, so the system RAM interface is not the
> bottleneck. Fast Writes and SBA are enabled in both cases.
>
> --
> "War is the continuation of politics by other means.
> It can therefore be said that politics is war without
> bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."
>
>
> "de Moni" <demonimummFILTER@mail.com> wrote in message
> newscnube$bek$1@phys-news1.kolumbus.fi...
>> Some people claim that games are loading about 50% faster with 8xAGP
>> compared to 4xAGP because textures are transferred faster to vram. Don't
>> know about the difference myself because I have always kept AGP at 8x...
>
>
>

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati (More info?)

1. It's 200 MHz *DDR*, so 400 MHz effective.
2. The bus width *per channel* is 64 bits, or 8 bytes; this has stayed the
same since the PII days.

So for single-channel it's 400 MHz * 8 bytes = 3200 MB/s, hence "PC3200".
Dual-channel adds another 64-bit interface, so bandwidth doubles to 6400
MB/s. This is why you see S939 Athlon64 CPUs being advertised with a 128-bit
memory bus.

3. AGP interface is also 64 bits wide, or 8 bytes. 533 * 8 = 4264 MB/s.

So the AGP is still the bottleneck. For reference, the local memory
bandwidth on a Geforce2 GTS is 5300 MB/s. Really, a card from five years ago
still has 25% bandwidth advantage over AGP8x!

--
"War is the continuation of politics by other means.
It can therefore be said that politics is war without
bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."


"Doug" <pigdos@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:V1UIe.2618$fJ1.2577@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com...
> Isn't AGP capable of xferring a LOT more data than even dual-channel at
> 200Mhz? Even with dual-channel, at 200 Mhz the maximum theoretical
> bandwidth is 200Mhz * 8bytes or 1600Mbytes/sec. The theoretical bandwidth
> for AGP 8x is 533Mhz * 4 bytes or 2128Mbytes/sec. Therefore your RAM is
> definitely bottlenecking at AGP 8x.

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati (More info?)

"Doug" <pigdos@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:60rMe.25$GV7.24@newssvr25.news.prodigy.net...
> Uh, wrong. AGP bus is 32-bits wide or 4 bytes,

Show me where it says 32-bits? The standard PCI bus is 32-bits, but I don't
think AGP is so.

> furthermore, your memory has a LOT more latency than the AGP bus does so
> you'll NEVER realize those kind of xfer rates. I'd like to see any
> benchmarks where dual-channel doubles the effective bandwidth.

Fair enough. All those calcs before were just theoretical maximums. More
important than any other factor, though: system memory still needs to feed
the CPU; so the video card can never get the full system memory bandwidth
for itself.

> The GeForce 2/GTS also has a slower GPU that could NEVER utilize AGP 8x
> because you can't clock-in data faster than the clock speed of the GPU.

AGP8x doesn't actually run at 533 MHz. It's either quad- or eight-pumped,
much like how the Pentium4 FSB is quad-pumped. The standard Geforce2 GTS
runs at 200 MHz core clock.

--
"War is the continuation of politics by other means.
It can therefore be said that politics is war without
bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati (More info?)

"Doug" <pigdos@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:84SMe.364$L03.278@newssvr27.news.prodigy.net...
> Look for this .pdf file agp30SpecUpdate06-21.pdf. Look at the AD pins in
> the AGP spec. these are the pins/lines that carry data bidirectionally and
> there are only 32 of them.

Fair enough. Looks like my sources were incorrect. The bidirectional
full-duplex operation may have been twisted into "64-bit" by some uninformed
author/marketing guy years ago.

> Um, the Geforce 2/GTS runs at 200Mhz, assuming it has a 32-bit interface
> to the AGP bus it can only clock in 800MB's of data MAX. This assumes the
> GPU has NOTHING else to do, but since it only has to support the AGP 4x
> spec maybe that's enough, but it could never keep up w/AGP 8x.

Only if 1 bit is transferred per pin per clock cycle. This was true in the
days before DDR, quad-pumped FSB, etc. As you recall, 3dfx cards always had
synchronous core and local memory clock speeds by default. Nowadays, this is
clearly not true, since the AGP 3.0 bus itself runs at 66 MHz (see the PDF),
but transfers 8 bits per pin per clock cycle.

--
"War is the continuation of politics by other means.
It can therefore be said that politics is war without
bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."