Curious problem....

Try Powerstrip? Try the last beta reference driver?

BTW you need to dig up the 3D Blaster bonus CD. There are a few CGL games on there that will only run on the Creative card due to a BIOS check.

swaaye wrote:

Try the last beta reference driver?

Now tried that, and the two Creative drivers I could find. FWIW Windows 98SE seems to have the latest-dated driver. No change with any of them.

I've removed the pcx-2 and voodoo1 and shifted to v2sli - it's running in an Athlon 700 board after all. The V2s work fine [athlon-compatible voodoo2 driver of course].

The system crawls like I've disabled the cache when loading windows. It's done this since I installed the rendition card - there were no issues with the motherboard previously, so I assume this is due to the v1000.

Is there a completely free version of powerstrip? I never had much luck getting it to do anything useful the few time I tried it, so I tended to end up avoiding it, with the free-user period running out without me feeling it's worth the money.

ratfink wrote:

The system crawls like I've disabled the cache when loading windows. It's done this since I installed the rendition card - there were no issues with the motherboard previously, so I assume this is due to the v1000.

AFAIR the v1000 has very poor 2D acceleration. The v2200 was somewhat better but still not as good as other 2D/3D cards from that era (S3 ViRGE, ATI Rage *, RIVA 128 Matrox Millenium/Mystique).
I would probably only put a v1000 in a system if I'd like to run software which doesn't run with anything else. And basically everything that runs on a v1000 will also run on a v2200 (maybe the executable needs to be patched).
Since you are using an Athlon 700 this is even more noticeable since the v1000 will be a major bottleneck (of course this also holds true for 3D, a 200 MHz Pentium is probably already overkill here).

idspispopd wrote:

AFAIR the v1000 has very poor 2D acceleration. ...
I would probably only put a v1000 in a system if I'd like to run software which doesn't run with anything else.

Ok, no problem then - in fact the slowness of the display helps some games display properly.

V1000 GUI acceleration isn't fast but I'm not sure how to quantify the speed you've described. It is certainly accelerated though and is faster than otherwise. Where it is extremely slow is VGA 320x200 or Mode X (you'll think you're on a 386). VBE modes are fast however.

Does the 3D work? You need to play a game that uses Speedy3D or RRedline to get reasonable 3D performance.

You may want to try running Rendition's DMA test utility to make sure the card is getting along with the motherboard PCI.

Ok, I tried dmatest.exe - it reports a successful test. I used the bios update that came with the 3dblaster driver. I tried using vtool to make the card use a different irq in case that was the problem, but although it confirms a changed irq, it seems to get ignored by the bios and windows.

vquake runs nice and fast. Haven't tried anything else yet. 3dmark99 refuses to run at all. dxdiag reports directx6.1 - the tests run slow.

[The v2s appear to not be set up for direct3d - is that normal? I thought I would be able to run 3dmark99 on them.]

Maybe I will try the v1000 in another machine.

Any news?

I am wondering if this could be an Athlon compatibility issue...

No, haven't got round to trying it with my socket 7 yet - maybe will have a chance tomorrow. That system currently has a winchip 200 in it, and boots and shuts down really fast compared to the athlon.

ratfink wrote:

[The v2s appear to not be set up for direct3d - is that normal? I thought I would be able to run 3dmark99 on them.]

No its not and you sould be able to run 3dmark99

Davros wrote:

ratfink wrote:

[The v2s appear to not be set up for direct3d - is that normal? I thought I would be able to run 3dmark99 on them.]

No its not and you sould be able to run 3dmark99

Ok, after swapping the v1000 for a Cirrus Logic, 3dmark99 still wouldn't run, so I installed directx7.0 and now it does. Must have been something got corrupted with directx6 I guess.

It's not exactly smooth, some things didn't look nice and I thought it had locked up at one point, but it got through to the end. I got a score of 3818 on default 800x600 settings. That PC still takes forever to shut down [I reckon it's at least 60 seconds on the "windows is shutting down" splash screen], but booting up is normal now.

Next I put the v1000 in my socket 7 box. Boot up seems normal, shut down is virtually immediate. And I can change the Windows screen resolution!

I suppose that raises a questionmark over athlon/rendition compatibility but I ought to do a fresh install on the athlon box with the v1000 put back in it, just to make sure it wasn't something that had got corrupted. Might be interesting to see if that long shutdown disappears [though I have the same problem on another box too].

Tried the v1000 back inthe athlon box, reinstalled 98 - no change. Tried SciDoctor - that enabled all the desktop resolutions, but the screen was corrupted after playing DOS games from Windows and a reboot was needed each time. So - abandoned this, put the v1000 back in the socket 7 box where it's much happier ie. works properly.