VOGONS


First post, by auron

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using an ET4000 for the first time and i wouldn't call the experience particularily great. it's a rev. C chip (took me using pci.exe to know, i was really wondering how people are figuring this out off the chip markings) with 2 MB of memory, which to my understanding should enable memory interleaving for maximum possible performance, and right off the bad the GUI performance in windows 95 osr2 with built-in drivers wasn't great - lots of redrawing visible on scrolling/moving windows which only gets worse at higher resolutions/color depth. dx6.1's dxdiag blitting test takes about a million years to complete. 800x600x24 is pretty much unbearable for my liking, 640x480x16 improves things but it's still not ideal. testing heroes 2 gold, things weren't so great either, this is only on a 430NX P90 by the way, but i know that even with slower CPUs and a good card like a matrox millennium, there shouldn't be such visible drawing on scrolling. what's more, in heroes 2 gold there were some slight horizontal streaks visible on screen changes - not sure if it's worth hunting for a newer driver to fix that. how bad is the rev. C exactly compared to rev. D, do the claimed issues especially manifest under windows 95? at least MDKs benchmark performed just as the stock p90 result, 45 IIRC.

for DOS testing, fastvid's vspeed tool yields 29.12 mb/s, speedsys 26.66 mb/s - these numbers aren't much to write home about. going from past experience with 430LX P60s, this system should be at least able to push 40-45 mb/s through its PCI bus, so that's not the bottleneck here. there is only a VESA 1.0 BIOS available, which won't run pcpbench, but i was able to find two tools to enable VBE 1.1 and 1.2, respectively - tlivesa and tlivesa1. using either of them will yield 10.3 fps in pcpbench, which is probably acceptable for this system but still more towards the bottom of the range. MDKs benchmark under DOS is a bit slower than reference, about 42. using those drivers will also reduce banked vga speed by a megabyte or so and interestingly, speedsys will detect video memory as 1 MB if one of these drivers are loaded, but all the resolutions are still available, so that must be just a misdetection. on that note it's rather curious how tlivesa1 (the VBE 1.2 driver) adds a 320x200x16 VESA mode but no 8-bit equivalent. did tseng ever bother releasing some tools to set refresh rate or get VBE 2.0, or is one stuck using univbe for that?

speaking of refresh rates, i had no luck setting that under win95 at all, and i tried three different methods - setting the DDC key to 1 in the registry as described in win95ddc.doc which is just reverted to 0 upon reboot, setting the default/refreshrate key to 75 or 85 which is also reverted, and setting refreshrate=75/85 under [display] in system.ini, which is ignored. what refresh rates can be expected from of the ET4000 and what is the easiest method for setting this under windows 95?

overall the ET4000 is probably just fine for VGA games but seems a questionable choice for win95 gaming if it even struggles to display a standard 640x480x8 game properly. IME the DRAM-based s3 vision cards aren't quite ideal for win9x either but they are definitely still preferable over this. the going rates for the ET4000 cards are rather inexplicable, but perhaps the ISA ones perform better in their class than the PCI versions.

Reply 1 of 2, by kixs

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Don't expect too much of an "old" chipset. It should be fine for basic Windows usage and without any graphic errors. For Win9x use Tseng ET6000 or ET6100 cards.

I wonder what brand is your card. Can you post some photos?

Requests are also possible... /msg kixs

Reply 2 of 2, by dr.zeissler

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Windows95 comes with a built in ET4000 driver. In my case there is a et4000/w32 2MB onboard.
I don't thin that directx2/3 came with a updated driver for the ET4000/w32.
Normally drivers from microsoft do not offer all features and are slow...so it's by far the better option to use a driver from the manufactor.

Still searching for the latest/fastest/best et4000 w32driver for win95(a).

Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines