How to improve perfomance of Geforce 4600

Felix Unger

Hi,

Just bought a MSI Geforce 4600, very nice and all that but...
Running on:

CPU: XP 1900+
RAM: 512MB PC2100
MB: MSI KT3 Ultra ARU
OS: Win 98 SE (If anybody is willing to buy me a copy of Win2000 Pro then I'll upgrade, otherwise it's this for the time being)

I'm getting a 3DMark 2001 SE score (on defaults) of 7,700 this seems about 3 or 4000 too low?

I'm running with the drivers from the installation CD at the moment, but they're close to the latest reference drivers.

In the MSI section of the control panel, it say's that AGP 4X and side band addressing is disabled, anyone know how to enable them?

Any tips or advice, barring overclocking.

Thanks...
Felix

DiscoStu

you should be getting at least 9000 with a rig like that. agp4x and sideband whatever should be enabled in the bios. upgrade the drivers to 30.82, the det40s are still buggy so dont go near them(although the first set of them they released were pretty stable). another problem it win98. nvidia dont put as much effort into drivers for the 9x kernals anymore.

CodeMonkey

Originally posted by Felix Unger
In the MSI section of the control panel, it say's that AGP 4X and side band addressing is disabled, anyone know how to enable them?

Check the BIOs though I doubt side band addressing help much. Enable AGP 4x and see what happens. Your system should be hitting 10,000 without any overclocking.

Kix

With strange results like that I'd be tempted to reinstall Windows.

K

Felix Unger

Thanks for those replies.
Regarding enabling AGP 4X in the BIOS, it is already enabled, but it's being reported as disabled in the MSI utility and sySandra (sp?). I was looking around for info on it and a VIA site says that there is a registry setting controlling this and sideband support, but it linked to the GeforceFAQ site for more info which is blocked from here (!?)

I'll try reinstalling the latest drivers, and then I might try booting from my second hard disk, which has a clean installation Win98SE.

Win98 wouldn't have THAT much of a difference s'hurely?

Thanks....
Felix

astrofool

install win2k or XP at the least, I have a similar setup to that (1800+ and abit with 4600) and hit 11,500+ in 3dmark

Felix Unger

Astro,
as I said, if you have a fully licensed version of either of the above OS's you mentioned up for grabs then I'll pay the P&P, otherwise I'll be sticking with Win98SE until I can justify spending around eur 300+ on a Win2KPro.
If Win98SE is the reason for this card running so slow then that goes a LONG way to justify an upgrade, but I think it's just down to either drivers or some registry/BIOS setting I've misconfigured.

The question of just *what* setting it is still stands though.

I'll try the drivers and check out the GeforceFAQ from home in the meantime.


Felix

BabyEater

That is very low i am running XP with a 1900XP , 512RAM on a KR7A with a Geforce 3 and i was getting 7600 . Formatting helps a good bit because i got that after i formatted now i am getting near 500 points less

Felix Unger

One other point which might be relevant, the Vertex Shading section of the test jumps and skips a lot. I mean a *lot* more than using my old geforce 2 ultra.

That either points to a bad driver revision I'm using or some highly unlikely damage to only that particular part of my GPU?

Kix

I know how some people feel about Win98 but I don't believe that for games etc. that that much worse than 2000/XP, if at all.

Try a few of the following, if you haven't already, they're good for restoring the health of your Win98 setup:

1. Reboot and clear out your Windows TEMP folder.
2. Run a scandisk on your drives.
3. Make sure you have a couple of 100MBs disk space free at least.
4. Ensure that you have the correct drivers for your motherboard - look for the VIA 4in1 drivers from the MSI website.
4. Change your graphics driver back to standard VGA, reboot and reinstall the Nvidia drivers.
5. Reinstall DirectX 8.1.
6. Defrag your drives over night.

Something sofware releated is clearly wrong with your machine and I wouldn't be surprised is these don't make a big difference.

GL.

K

Quigs Snr

Make sure the AGP Port driver is correctly installed. I have a near identical setup to you cept mine is an XP2000, apart from the important things are the same. I get about 9400 in Windows 98 SE (10,500 in XP).

Without the up to date AGP port driver for my mobo I was getting about 7000 also.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

i just installed a gf4 ti4600 128meg DDR , and i got a score of about 7400 on the 3dmark default benchmark...


4x is enabled, i have a 1.2ghz athlon, 512megs ram, and am running 2k. am using the 30.82 drivers too, is weird. i had expected to be getting better than that

BabyEater

I would say our cpu and ram (if it is sd) is your bottleneck mordeth

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

aye, i've noticed that windows never uses more than 170 megs of my ram.. no matter what it's doing..

it never seems sluggish or anything, but still.. it oughta be using more than that right?
specially when burning cds or encoding divx..

Felix Unger

Quigs,

That sounds very promising, it's good to hear from someone who had the same problem and similar H/W, OS etc.


Kix,

I'll be trying the complete overhaul if the above fails, still pretty wierd about the Vertex Shading test though (the test with the trenchcoated guy shooting other copies of himself), I mean that ran like silk on my old geforce 2 with the exact same setup?


I'll let you know the results, or whether I decide to ship it back for replacement/refund.


Felix

astrofool

just as a test, change your agp aperture size to 64 in the bios.

I had a gef3 that used to score about 1800 on 3dmark when i had that at 256 and it refused to do a couple tests, changed it back and all was well, scoring 5000+

Felix Unger

Well, at last,

Having installed the MSI VIA 4in1 drivers and causing my machine to screw up majorly (it was probably my fault, in conjunction with some lack of instructions in the setup program) as I installed some VIA drivers which were probably not correct for my machine.

So after playing around with that for a while, having no joy and a machine that couldn't run anything direct x related, I started on a reinstall.

Now this is the weird bit, the reinstallation went on top of my existing installation of Win98 and repaired it, leaving some of the drivers (e.g. Detonator) but removing others (Direct X), so once I installed Direct X 8.1b again on the system everything was hunky dory (!?).

End result:

3DMark 2001 SE: 10,200!
(And the Vertex Shading section is back running smoothly)


It looks like it was the AGP mini driver.

Thanks for the help guys, especially Kix and Quigs!

Felix