rec.autos.simulators

Can anyone tell me if this was a "fix" for pre-Natoma chipset (82440)
based Pentium Pro motherboards or do you still need this utility if you
have for example an Intel Venus VS440FX Natoma chipset Motherboard?

Thanks in advance!
Ray

It probably depends on your BIOS.  The current Venus BIOS (1.00.06 CS1)
does not provide the functionality of fastvid.  What fastvid does is
enable a feature called "write combining" for the memory region used
when accessing the video board.  What this does is allow back-to-back
writes to the video card to use burst-mode transfers on the PCI bus
which are much more efficient.  If you have an Intel motherboard with
AMI BIOS, you do need it.  It may be that other BIOSes can enable
write combining by default.  It's easy enough to check.  Along with
fastvid, you can get a small utility program called "showmsr".  It
will print out the regions of memory in your system, and their caching
behavior.  If the linear frame buffer address of your video board is
not set for "write-combining", you should run fastvid.

On my Venus system with Matrox Millenium, I get 29 MB/Sec transfers to
video before fastvid, and 93 MB/Sec after.

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Scott Pritchett

Thanks for your great advice! What is your occupancy rate at first
corner of Monaco, and what details do you leave OFF (ie. sky, track,
etc) to get a realtime racing feel?

Also, I am deciding whether to go with Matrox Millenium or Hercules
Dynamite 128/Video boards.  What do you think.  I have read great
reviews about Hercules board but dont know whether it would outperform
Matrox in GP2.  I know that a Matrox would be great overall card, but I
need the best card available right now for REALTIME RACING in GP2.

Thanks again!
Ray

This is from memory, so it might be slightly wrong.  I have all
details except sky turned on in the front, and just about everything
off in the mirrors (I like the simple mirror display so I haven't
experimented much there).  The system estimate is 25.6 FPS (not >25.6
FPS).  I manually select the setting that's about 2 FPS below that to
give more consistent results.  In normal racing conditions, I normally
get about 65%-70% occupancy.  When clouds of smoke are on screen, the
occupancy can go to 160% or more.  In the pits or with full-screen
billboards displayed, the occupancy can hover around 100%.  I don't
normally run the monaco track, so I'll have to do the experiment and
let you know what the result is later.

As far as the comparisons between the Matrox and Hercules cards goes,
I don't have any good information directly comparing them on this
class of machine.  You might wish to peruse the Quake benchmark page at

http://www.cam.org/~agena/quake.html

and see what conclusions you come to.  This page doesn't give the
exact comparison you want.  You might also find the information at

http://www.dfw.net/~sdw/

to be useful when configuring a system.
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Scott Pritchett