Motherboards for Rendition

Anyone recommend the best motherboard for rendition games. I seem to remember problems with Tyan M?Bs? I have Reactor card & will want MMX with maybe an AMD K6 CPU. Cheers Steve Garey

>Anyone recommend the best motherboard for rendition games. I seem to >remember problems with Tyan M?Bs? I have Reactor card & will want MMX with >maybe an AMD K6 CPU. >Cheers >Steve Garey Even though it might not answer your specific question, be sure and check Tom's Hardware Page at http://www.sysdoc.pair.com. I do know that the Intergraph Reactor works with the ASUS P55T2P4 board that is mentioned on Tom's site. Your question will become more complex this month when the new boards ship. I expect most of the new rendition boards with the 2200 chip will be available in both PCI and AGP versions. Notice that they do not quote different specs for PCI -vs- AGP versions. I suspect they will be priced the same since they will probably perform the same. Future cards might require the use of the AGP for higher levels of performance? I've got my eye on the ASUS P2L97 Pentium II board for whenever in September the Herculese Thriller 3D AGP board comes out. I want to see first hand the difference (if any) between the Thriller 3D PCI and the Thriller 3D AGP. If there is a big difference, we might all be asking your question with the addition of AGP support. -- Best Wishes!!! Robert Huggins Raleigh, NC

Steve, For what it is worth, I just got a K6 233 w/ the Abit IT5H motherboard. I have it underclocked right now to 225 with a 75mhz bus speed. I have an Intergraph card and 64MB of 60ns EDO ram. Grand Prix II wouldn't run with hardly any graphics turned on with my 133 - I can now run with ALL the graphics turned on, start from the back of the field at Monaco and get silky smooth graphics. It is smooth in traffic, through the turns and runs great - it is a totally new game as I had pretty much given up on it until I got a faster processor. I have run Nascar II extensively (using the Rendition executable) for quite some time, so I have a decent comparison between my 133 and my 233. Bottom line is they run almost EXACTLY the same speed wise. Martinsville is still poor into the turns and certain tracks still have their glitches coming out of turn 4 or at other spots. I was pretty disappointed when I ran this. I don't have any PCI latency things to tweak in the bios, but I believe the problem with Nascar II is the programming of the rendition executable. I decided to try Nascar II running the normal nascar2.exe and while the graphics were poorer, there was no noticeable lag or choppiness at any of the spots I normally see them. I just read from someone on the group here that there will be a new and faster rendition executable with the BGN track pack. Gosh, I hope they are right!!! If anyone has any official confirmation of this, I'd love to see it. I think just a little better programming would make the Rendition version of N2 smoke on my setup. If you have any questions about my setup, just shoot me an email. --Aaron

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> Anyone recommend the best motherboard for rendition games. I seem to > remember problems with Tyan M?Bs? I have Reactor card & will want MMX with > maybe an AMD K6 CPU. > Cheers > Steve Garey

-- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Aaron Holtz First Network Group "The First Name in Internetworking" Manager, UNIX Systems Admin "There are no stupid questions, only stupid people asking questions." - CB --------------------------------------------------------------------------

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> I have run Nascar II extensively (using the Rendition > executable) > for quite some time, so I have a decent comparison between my 133 and my > 233. > Bottom line is they run almost EXACTLY the same speed wise. > Martinsville is > still poor into the turns and certain tracks still have their glitches > coming > out of turn 4 or at other spots. I was pretty disappointed when I ran > this. > I don't have any PCI latency things to tweak in the bios, but I believe > the > problem with Nascar II is the programming of the rendition executable.

Have you tried the -4 switch to force the lower color-depth textures? The problem is that the graphics card is having to page textures in and out. 4-bit textures take half the space, so causes less paging from slow main RAM. (Faster main RAM would help too, but less dramatically.) ---Jim

Thanks to Jim for this suggestion/explanation. I had heard of this feature before (hell, it's probably in the manual but who reads those things?), but I wasn't sure this was the problem. By running 'nasrend.exe -dma -4' not only do the graphics still appear to be the same (I surely can't tell the difference), but I get exactly what I would have expected out of my K6 233 performance wise. Every glitch that was there before and every slowdown at the tracks that were there before are GONE. The fantasy tracks are silky smooth and yes, even Martinsville is like running on the backstretch at Tally. Thanks for the hint on trying to solve this. I apologize to any programmer who I may have insulted.... But it does bring up the question that if the graphics don't appear to be different and the speed is double or triple, why isn't the 4 bit textures the default? Is the default something like 16 or 24, or is it 8? No point in arguing, it works great. Thanks again. --Aaron > Have you tried the -4 switch to force the lower color-depth textures? > The problem is that the graphics card is having to page textures in and > out. 4-bit textures take half the space, so causes less paging from slow > main RAM. (Faster main RAM would help too, but less dramatically.) > ---Jim

I recently upgraded to a Dell Dimension XPS 233 mmx system with 32 mb sdram. I took the Sierra rendition card out of my old system (p90) and put it in my new system. My frame rate is very smooth in win95. While it was good in my PB p-90 with the rendition card, I got pauses in the turns in win95. On this new system, there are no pauses. I have set the min frame rate to 30 fps and run with all graphics on, and they all stayed on. If your getting pauses, try running it in rendition with the -4 command switch. This forces the system to load 4 bit textures instead of 8 bit textures. I believe you have to have the patch installed in order to use the -4 switch. Just start the sim with the "renddma -4" command. This should alleviate your pauses. I don't have any problem running it without the -4 command. DonB.