rec.autos.simulators

   I really liked that card, but Need For Speed froze last night.  
I had to do a power off reboot.  Everything except Delta force
behaves exactly the same way, as soon as the sim tosses up any
graphic requiring the 3D processor.  

   I rebuilt Win98 SE from tape, hoping that a new copy of the
drivers would make a difference.  No Joy.  

   I'm launching this post now so I might get some response,
it's Saturday afternoon PDT in the US, I'm hoping to get
suggestions for a shopping trip this afternoon.  

   After I launch this post I'm going to see if I can get my
Matrox card working.  I don't suppose drivers updates have
elevated Matrox to the preferred platform for 3D sims.  I just
want to test that some card can do 3D sims.  

   First, how do I remove the 3DFX drivers?  I don't see
anything in the program add/remove menus that looks like Voodoo
drivers.  

   Isn't it time to turn to Geforce?  I'm loyal to products
that give me good service, but 3DFX is gone.  I'm thinking
Geforce 2, I prefer high end, but Geforce 3 seems a little too
far ahead of the curve.  My PC is a dual P3/600, so it's hot
be a good candidate for a cutting edge video card like the
Geforce 3 anyway.  

   Or should I be looking at the ATI Radion?  I know absolutely
nothing about them.  

   Assuming Geforce 2, what alphabet soup do I want stuck on
the end?  "MX", "GTS", "Ultra" and don't mean much to me.  

   I'll be going to Fry's or CompUSA.  Any preferred brands
and model names?  I like lots of memory, but I don't want to
toss money for no reason.  And what kind of memory do I want
What do I want?  

   Or am I sitting on more graphic horse poser than anyone
could ever use with my Matrox G400 Max.  

   Yea, I have no doubt that these have all been covered in
previous posts, but I did a Deja search for "geforce" in
both rec.autos.simulators and c.s.i.p.g.flight-sim, back to
this spring, and didn't find what I need.  

   Oh, one more thing.  My V5 5500 was AGM as is my Matrox.  

   It might be nice to have my Geforce on the PCI bus, so I
can have both that and my Matrox, which is AGM, installed.  
But I don't want to do this if its going to result in any
perceptible hit on my game performance.  

   So, Geforce or Radion, which one, and what price points
I should expect to pay at Fry's or CompUSA would be
appreciated.  

   Anyway, I'm going to swap in the Matrox now.  Any
shopping tips to get me back in the sims tonight are
appreciated.  

                                                  Thanks
                                                  Larry

Not sure what chipset you are running but someone I know went through
hell getting his RADEON AIW model running properly with his dual P3 VIA
chipset board, he could not solve his problems until drivers for a later
build of XP, not in Win98 or 2K but I am unsure whether his problems
were with the AIW's specialized Video features or using it in games. If
you are running a 19" or larger monitor and run at 1280x1024 or greater
be ready to be disappointed in the sharpness of the text if you go for a
GF2, my GF3 which is supposed to be much better in the 2D department
than other Nvidia cards is still not as sharp as my V5, it isn't bad,
just not as crisp.

I also have a V5, though it is a PCI version.  I don't know if it is
connected, but the demo for Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed did something
pretty drastic to my system the first time I ran it.  It froze, requiring a
reboot, whereupon I was informed that I would need to reinstall Windows
(Win98SE) :(  Thirty minutes later, I had completed this task, only to be
presented with the same message!  I could only get into safe mode, and
nothing I did in there seemed to help.  Being a non-techie, the only way I
knew how to deal with it was to reformat the C: drive and start from
scratch.  Not quite as drastic as it sounds in my case, as I had only just
put the system together the week before.  Nevertheless I was well along with
software reinstallations and this was irritating in the extreme.

3dfx Tools should be in there, and I believe you need to remove those.
AFAIK, you can then remove the drivers from Device Manager.  The 3dfx card
should revert to standard VGA drivers, and you can then reinstall the Voodoo
drivers and 3dfx Tools.  I think that's how it goes.  (That's probably what
I should have done instead of reinstalling Windows, but I did what I was
told).

I hope you get it sorted out.  NFS is never going anywhere near my system
again.

--
Paul

   Yes and yes.  

   I'm very interested in the Geforce 3, but I think I'll wait for the
Ultra, and for brave folks to shake the dust out.  

   My P3/600 has a 21" monitor.  Run in as high a resolution as the
sims, and the frame rate, will allow.  

   I think this Supermicro motherboard has Intel chipsets.  

   Bummer.  I write C++ on this PC, sharp text is important.  

                                                            Thanks
                                                            Larry

1) Stay away from the MX cards.
2) The only difference between the GTS, PRO and Ultra cards is the core and
memory speed. GTS are the slowest and Ultra the fastest.

---
"I ned no splellsheker!"

Never used a Radeon or any other ATI card myself, but they reportedly have
had continuing problems developing good drivers for their products, at least
from the gamer's point of view. It's mostly for this reason that I've
avoided them, though the Radeon hardware is said to be great stuff.

GTS is the "full house" GeForce2 so to speak, with the Pro and Ultra models
being speeded-up versions of the original GTS (faster memory, higher core
clock speeds).

MX cards are the "value" models for price-conscious buyers, and are very
good for most purposes including games but don't have the bandwidth of the
GTS cards, so performance especially at very high resolution is likely to
suffer. There are two new versions of MX, the MX400 which is essentially the
original MX with a faster core clock (which reportedly does little or no
good, since the MX bottleneck is memory bandwidth), and the MX200 which is
for REALLY price-conscious buyers and has even lower bandwidth.

I have a GTS in my Pentium III 866 machine and an MX in my Celeron 633
machine, and like them both very much. Of course the GTS in the faster box
benchmarks a lot higher, but I find the MX in the slower computer still
perfectly satisfactory even for pretty demanding flight sims. However, I
have 17-inch monitors on both computers and rarely run anything at higher
than 1024x768x16. If you need much higher resolution or bit depth than that,
some flavor of GTS (standard, Pro or Ultra) would be the way to go.

With nVidia chipsets I don't know that brand makes a great deal of
difference, though I would avoid the no-names. My GTS is Creative Labs, my
MX is Elsa. Both are fine.

Currently there are a lot of 64MB cards, though Anandtech
(www.anandtech.com) says there's no benefit now to that much memory on a
graphics card since there's nothing today that uses that much texture;
apparently it's just manufacturers putting on more memory because buyers
think 64MB must be better than 32MB and will pay more for it. It's possible
of course that games and perhaps other apps in the future will use the extra
memory (but will today's card still be what you want by that time, is a
question).

Seneca

My V3 3000 died last weekend.  The video memory went on it (nothing
buy weird vertical lines on the startup and Win98Se was unreadable)
If I let the card cool down it would work fine for about 5 minutes and
then the card would ***out.  

I just bought a Herc Prophet 3d Geforce  2 MX at Staples for $99.00
Canadian (about $60. US)  
The card works great.  Since I am running a Celery 466 - 66 MHZ bus
(AGP 1.0 Slot), and 192 mb ram, the bottleneck will be the CPU, not
the Geforce.

If you look on the net for reviews on the Geforce 2 MX the numbers
aren't bad compared to the GTS or Ultra.  I have read good things
about the MX 400 (basically a MX with a fan) but haven't read anything
about the MX 200.  

On my system is was hard to justify the cost of the addition $160.
The only thing I miss is the ability to use Glide.  I have tried some
Glide wrappers but haven't been able to get any game to recognize them
yet.  The only problem I have had with a game is NFS: HS has fuzzy
text in the menu, but the actual race looks good.  

My advice is to look at the reviews on the net for the new cards,  I
don't know what the buzz is about the Kyro chipset.  I guess it all
depends on if you play in 32 bit or 16 - from what I have heard the
Kyro's work better in 32 but suck in 16 bit.  Good Luck!

PS- if someone you sent me a link on the Creative Unified Wrapper,
I would appreciate it.  Thank You,

Chris

On Sun, 9 Sep 2001 07:21:15 +0200, "Figaro"

   < Snip >

   Thanks for the responses.  

   I had to hit CompUSA before most of you had a chance
to respond.  My buddies who had been denied their NFS  
fix Friday night were restless.  

   With the incredible IL-2 Sturmovik screen shots being
posted by Geforce 3 users, and Papadocs aren't bad
either, and my feeling that a P3/600 might not be a
good match for a Geforce 3, I decided to low ball it
with a $130 Visiontek Geforce2 Mx 400 as a place holder
until I get my next PC.  Do you think a Geforce 3 would
be a good fit for my 2 year old PC?  

   When I started NFS, the screen went blank shortly
after starting, before any 3D graphics come up, and
that was all that NFS does with the MX.  I've tried a
variety of drivers from Visiontek's site.  I've tried
16 bit color and the only items in IRQ 11 are the
Geforce and that interrupt steering thing.  I also
turned off "Get IRQ table using ACPI BIOS", as the
book suggested.  

   I've had to reload Win 98, and most of my sims are
now absent.  But F1 CS 2000 looks fine.  

   My friends are upset about not being able to run
NFS, after struggling through the game's "Evolution"
and finally having the hot car, I can understand
their disappointment if they can't drive it.  If a
Geforce 2 MX won't run NFS with a variety of drivers
is there any expectation, I know anything is possible,
that a higher end Geforce 2 or 3 will?  

                                             Thanks
                                             Larry

Thaks Smedley:

    Can you point me to this?  

   A right click in the middle of the screen, then "properties" doesn't
show a "Direct3D Settings" tab.  

   From there, "Settings" - "Advanced...", doesn't have it either.  

   I've gone into the "GeForce2..." tab but that's also dry.  

   I recovered Win98 SE from a tape I made in June, I think this is
DX8a.  

   I'm a Unix guy and much of the common knowlage about Win 98
evades me.  

                                                           Thanks
                                                           Larry

http://www.nvmax.com/cgi-bin/news/viewnews.pl?newsid999807762,77799,

There are other tweaking utilities also. Hopefully that will work for
you, if not c'mon back.

here's the direct link (1.2M D/L):

http://www.charnleys.co.uk/NVmaxSP.EXE

check your mail.

Thanks Smedley:

   I don't know, I hit additional properties in the
GeForce2 window and the anti-alias screen popped up.  
I missed that I also had a new set if tabs, which
includes "Direct3D Settings".  

   But I have a good excuse, I'm an idiot.  

   Anyway, "Enable fog table emulation" is, and has
been, checked.  As is "Adjust Z-buffer depth to
rendering depth if unequal"

   NFS fails like this.  A small, quarter screen on
my 1600 x 1200, NFS startup window pops up, if auto-
starting from the CD this window has a menu, where
you click "play".  After this screen the game
blanks briefly and then NFS goes full screen with
some animation, blue letters come flying onto the
screen and a movie of Porsches terrorizing the
neighborhood in low resolution if I remember
correctly.  I think it's just playing a pre-recorded
cut sceens and I doubt any 3D graphics processing is
involved.  It's this blanking between the small
startup window and the full screen where the display
stays blank.  <CTL-ALT-DEL> and ending the task will
get things back to the desktop.  

   Anyway, I appreciate your suggestion, got any more?  

                                              Thanks
                                              Larry

---

R.I.P.