[Captain Moran]

I recently installed new drivers for my nvidia 6800 GT and for some reason (maybe my screw up) all my OpenGL apps are slow, slow, slow.

Anyone hit this before?

[CKid]

No, and I have the same card.

[ARSPR]

Read this thread: SCP Troubles

You can be suffering from ForceWare 169.xx issues. And maybe they don't work fine with OGL applications in general. As example even with the latest official release (169.25 in Vista 169.21 in XP), the game doesn't render fine with original -no_glsl render system.

Please perform any tests you can think of, (reinstall drivers, reinstall old drivers, test any other OGL game you have, ...) and add the info to the linked thread.

[FlashFire]

You might have already covered this base, but what OS are you running? Vista is known to have issues with OGL.

[Captain Moran]

I'm pretty sure it was 169.xx driver issues. I am in the process of rebuilding my system (which I needed to do anyway for other reasons.) I will post results.

Thanks, all.....

[Captain Moran]

Figured it out...

I had reset my AGP Aperture setting in BIOS to a very low value.

On my particular motherboard this has a drastic effect on OpenGL performance. After much other mucking about, I reset the AGP aperture to something more reasonable and all is well.

[FlashFire]

Wow.. talk about your obscure fixes.

[jr2]

That's not obscure.  IGPs use some of the system memory as their own (because they don't have any dedicated memory for themselves), and if the value is set high (eg, 128 MB with 256 MB total system memory) you get instability in the system.  If its set too low (eg, 32 or 64 MB), you get poor GFX performance.  @Captain, get like 1GB or preferrably 2GB of RAM, then set GFX memory as high as it will go.  That would be best for overall performance.

[karajorma]

Yeah but the problem wasn't the memory, the problem was the AGP Aperture. And that's a pretty uncommon problem because it's rare for it to be set so wrongly.

[FlashFire]

Yeah but the problem wasn't the memory, the problem was the AGP Aperture. And that's a pretty uncommon problem because it's rare for it to be set so wrongly.

That's what I mean. Shared memory of course affects performance if not enough is allocated to the video card... But the AGP Aperture... that's pretty uncommon.

[jr2]

According to Breaking the BIOS Barrier, IIRC, the Aperture is supposed to be set to the same amount as the Video card's memory.  In an IGP, I think it also serves the dual purpose of setting the shared memory, as the values are supposed to be the same, no?

[karajorma]

You're assuming he has an IGP. Below 16MB will actually cause problems even on machines with AGP cards rather than integrated graphics. And that is a pretty odd error since you shouldn't be setting it that low in the first place.

[Captain Moran]

1. Yes. Setting it too low was a mistake.

2. No. I do not have integrated graphics. I have a Geforce 6800 GT 256M.

3. I have 2 GB of ram. I am current running the AGP aperture at 256M which is the maximum value allowed by my BIOS. Running WCS at it's default settings has it looking and running very well.

[karajorma]

Just out of interest what did you have it set to? I seem to remember that very low sizes cause problems with GART.

[Captain Moran]

4MB. The lowest setting my BIOS will support.

[FlashFire]

4MB. The lowest setting my BIOS will support.

 

[Captain Moran]

Ok, it's a long story.

I have a dual boot system with XP and Win98. I keep 98 around since I have quite a few games that just seem to have less problems on that OS. I also have dual video cards (Geforce 6800 GT AGP and Voodoo3 PCI) for much the same reason; I have games that were designed for 3DFX and just look and run better running under the Win98/Voodoo configuration.

I also have 2GB of RAM in my system which causes no end of fits for Windows 98. I use the MaxPhysPage workaround to get 98 to work, but there are known problems with using an AGP card due to the way the AGP memory is mapped to physical RAM. Just for grins I thought maybe lowering the aperture size might be a workaround but, alas, it it still gives 98 grief. My bad was not resetting the aperture back to something sane after my experimenting.

Given my configuration I am basically stuck using a PCI video card with my Win98 boot which is not a bad thing given what I run on Windows 98. All the games that require any kind of horsepower run on my XP config.

[Tolwyn]

Just an idea: have you thought about using a virtual pc (Win98) for gaming? Virtual Box should be capable of handling older games, that do not require 3d acceleration.

[jr2]

Also, try downloading CacheMan for Windows 9x.. IIRC, it has an option to actually limit your physical memory.  You want 256 MB of RAM for 9x, as it can't use more than this.

EDIT: here.  You want Cacheman, not Cacheman XP... Cacheman is in the list. 

EDIT2: 256 MB = 262144 KB, in case you must specify memory in KB. 

[FlashFire]

The magic number for RAM in Windows 98 is 768 (or was it 798?). Anyway... I remember this I had 512 MB, then upgraded to 1 Gig only to discover Windows not playing along. I had to go with a registry hack to limit it to 7xx (... dyslexia sucks.)


PS - Not dyslexic... just forgetful.