Sorry for the nerdy question, but should I use UNIVBE with GP2?
Last time I tried it (with ICR2 I think) it seemd to have no real
benefit. Is it only for VESA cards? Do VESA cards actually
include PCI cards?
(I have a DX4/120, with a 2MB Cirrus 5440 PCI). GP2 pretty much sucks
in SVGA, but is OK in VGA (still with quite a bit of texture etc
switched off). I've also run it in VGA and SVGA on a P90, and would
still prefer VGA because it feels more responsive. SVGA looks very
nice, but you have to switch off *so* much detail it hardly seems
worth it.
--
Andrew Jackson (Bracknell, Berkshire, England). Laissez le bon temps roulez!
>Sorry for the nerdy question, but should I use UNIVBE with GP2?
>Last time I tried it (with ICR2 I think) it seemd to have no real
>benefit. Is it only for VESA cards? Do VESA cards actually
>include PCI cards?
You're welcome. Seems you are making a pretty common mistake concering
the term VESA. VESA is an association of video engineers and
manufacturers trying to establish standards for video processing on
PCs. There are two main achievements of VESA so far:
1) The VESA local bus; the bus architecture that was hip after ISA and
before PCI busses. Invented by those guys because they felt ISA video
cards were way too slow, and PCI took forever to develop.
2) The VESA video standard. This is a set of video resolutions defined
by VESA. It is stored either in the bios of your video card, or loaded
by a driver. The idea is that a game (or other app.) just tells the
card "Let's use mode 12h!", and the card immediately knows that 12h
means 640x480x265colors (or something the like, I don't know VESA
codes by heart.) Otherwise, every programmer would have to write their
own routines for every mode and every card. That would be slower and
more troublesome. [1]
1) and 2) have *nothing* to do with each other, except that this Vesa
group is behind both achievements. This means, you may have a video
card for the VESA local bus that has no "VESA support" implemented. Or
you may have a PCI video card with "VESA support". Actually, most
modern PCI cards feature a VESA bios, version 1.2 or, since recently,
version 2.0.
UNIVBE 5.something (it changed its name recently to something else)
contains a driver that updates the VESA information of the card to
version 2.0 and speeds up most cards considerably because of clever
programming. VBE 2.0 also features "linear framebuffering". I have no
clue what that means precisely, but it is capable of increasing the
video speed of games enormously - provided the games support this new
standard. GP2 doesn't. :(
Try loading univbe and see if it makes a difference. Check the
graphics menu and see if the suggested framerate increases after
loading the driver. You might also try starting the game with "gp2
log:on" and compare the values for video speed in the file gp2log.txt.
Try the most recent version of univbe. If it helps, buy it. If not
don't. ;)
[mailed and posted]
[1] I'm not a professional computerist, so, if somebody knows better,
feel free to correct me.
--
We're in a road movie to Berlin
Can't drive out the way we drove in
