[Fineus]

Uh.. the images speak better than I can explain but this is bothering me... games seem to run ok but as you can see from these shots it seems like AGP is disabled on my system. I don't see how this is possible while I still maintain good performance but if anyone has any thoughts - I'm all ears.

[Fineus]

System specs are:

MSI GeForce4 4600 Ti
AMD 2600+ XP
768MB DDR 2100 RAM
etc.

[diamondgeezer]

Detonator, mobo and BIOS versions?

[Hunter]

Motherboard specs please?

Some Mobos don't support AGP, despite HAVING an AGP slot, IE PC Chips boards freeze up in some games, causing the Mobo to lockup.

[Flipside]

I'm assuming you've checked the BIOS setting for your AGP and make sure the AGP settings haven't fubared. If so, it may be something as simple as your BIOS battery starting to go bye bye?

[Fineus]

Motherboard is a Chaintech Zenith 7NJS - it supports AGP 8x apparently (though my GF4 doesn't).

Detonators aren't being used - although that doesn't change the message any (trust me, I noticed it a while ago).

Not sure about BIOS versions, but they should be recent enough.

[Fury]

Go to your BIOS settings and ensure that AGP Aperture size is at least 32.

Then launch dxdiag and see what it says in display tab.
You may have to uninstall both chipset/AGP and NVIDIA drivers, reboot and install either the latest or second to latest version of the drivers.

[Liberator]

Check this thread, from over at the Relic forums.  Many people had this problem when they installed HW2.

[Fineus]

Thanks for the ideas guys... so far Liberators looked the most promising, but when I installed the latest drivers my system refused to start so I had to revert back again. I'm thinking a format and clean install with the latest drivers might work but I don't know if I want to chance it. Thinking of reverting everything and being happy with PCI for the time being.

[diamondgeezer]

Does 3D Mark have anything pertinent to say?

[aldo_14]

I have this some thing (I now realise), except installshield doesn't work, so I can't even update my dirvers - the bloody thing just 'stops' after the loading bar completes.

[Darkage]

I got the same with my Radeon 9600XT 256MB DDR

[Fineus]

So.... seems the problem is fairly wide spread then? Anyone think this is a serious issue and a real performance problem, or just some little bug? (I'm thinking option A, but don't quote me).

[mikhael]

Thunder, even if AGP mode is disabled for some reason you can, and probably will, get good performance any any game with decent resource management.

AGP vs PCI mode only ever matters in one event: Your video card doesn't have enough texture memory and has to allocate some from the system core to make up the difference. In this case, you will see a performance decrease whether or not you're in AGP mode, because a fetch back along the AGP bus is orders of magnitude slower than a fetch from the card's on board RAM.

I wouldn't worry about it unless/until you actually see problems.

[Darkage]

I installed updated drivers for my VIA chipset before the update it said AGP Version 2.0 now 3.0. So it did update. And my card doesn't say that it is connected to PC1 anymore. So it seems like a good thing.

[Liberator]

AGP's has a larger potential bandwidth, about twice PCI, IIRC.

[aldo_14]

Bloody 'ell...finally fiuxed it (needed to reinstall / replace the PCI-to_PCI bus drivers), but not after installing windows Service Pack 4 - which promtly broke my computer, preventing ANY windows from opening, the taks manager from showing, ctrl-alt-delete working, the pc restarting normally, and many more things.

[Fineus]

Eugh.. not getting very far with this.

I tried reinstalling my mobos latest drivers which caused the computer to crash - so I rolled back to the ones I was using before and tried a set of Via 4 in 1s. The computer starts without issues but still reports that the graphics card is in PCI mode. Nothing seems to work. Does anyone have any ideas as to how I can get it working?

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Kalfireth
Eugh.. not getting very far with this.

I tried reinstalling my mobos latest drivers which caused the computer to crash - so I rolled back to the ones I was using before and tried a set of Via 4 in 1s. The computer starts without issues but still reports that the graphics card is in PCI mode. Nothing seems to work. Does anyone have any ideas as to how I can get it working?

Ok...um, go to the control pane, system then the hardware listing.  Look for the 'system' tab, and look for a 'PCI-to-PCI bridge' in it.  Select that, then try manually updating the drivers (from your mobo Cd, etc) - you should hopefully have a list of them, one of which will be the default MS one (i.e. AGP(PCI) mode), and one of which will be the 'proper' AGP driver.  Update that, and bob should be your fathers brother.

Unofrtunately, i can only speak for the nForce2 board i'm using, I'm not sure if / how well this will work for other chipsets.

Another thing to keep an eye out for - if you're using nForce2 drivers - is the updated SATA drivers nVidia offers upon install.  when I installed these, they FUBAR-ed my CD drive.  Possibly because I'm only using IDE drives (I only kept SATA drivers installed for future use, I didn't expect them to cause a conflict).

EDIT; looks like your mobo is nForce2 - try the drivers from the nVidia website.  If they 'stop' for no apparent reason (i.e. after the splash screen nothing happens and the installshiled window, etc, never appear), it may very well be that PCI-PCI bridge thing.

I can only assume that Windows shoving it's generic drivers confuses the install as to whether it's an nForce2 chipset or not.

[Fineus]

I love you aldo_14, and I want to have your babies. The method worked perfectly and I'm now running AGP 4X. UT 2004s slowdown issues have evaporated. My thanks