'Fast Writes' On Platforms With I820 And I840
It seems as if NVIDIA is currently having some problems with 'Fast Writes'. This feature is obviously supposed to improve performance, but currently the system runs faster without it. Unfortunately 'Fast Writes' are enabled by default in GeForce's driver. There is a way however to disable it at least under Windows 95/98.
A registry switch is also taking care of the fast writes:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\System]
"ReqAGPFW"=dword:00000000
Again I'd like to note that you need to restart your system to make the setting effective. The same person who published the hoax with the AGP-speed switch also advises to turn this feature on by entering '1'. This doesn't have any impact on platforms with chipsets other than i820 or i840. It's also the default setting anyway, so that you can definitely save the time of entering this setting in the 'enabled'-mode into your registry. You will only get the quite noticeable performance-boost by disabling this feature though, via entering the above shown '0'.
Here are some benchmarks that show the difference:
'Fast Writes' On Platforms With I820 And I840 - 3DMark2000
'Fast Writes' On Platforms With I820 And I840 - SphereMark
