First post, by B24Fox
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Hey everyone.
I just wanna quickly share my experience, after banging my head against this issue for almost 10 hours (and finally solving it... sort of)
My test rig : Socket A machine w/ VIA chipset, an AthlonXP2000+, 256MB of DDR1@266mhz, and 2 HDDs ( 1 for Win98 & 1 for WinXP).
I have two Matrox G450 PCI SGRam cards, that look just like this:
One of 'em has a 2003 date code, and the other: 2006.
Now these cards would NOT play nice with any driver that I tried either under 98 or XP.
After installing the driver and rebooting the screen would always get very corrupted in windows, and within 5 seconds the system would end up frozen.
What I had to do to get 'em working under XP:
- Enabled PnP OS (in BIOS)
- Reinstalled the way newer 2006 driver: v5.96.004 (from Matrox' website: https://www.matrox.com/en/video/apps/drivers/ … previous/legacy)
In my case, that was the only driver that worked after enabling PnP OS in BIOS. (also tried v5.82.018 from 2002, but it was a no-go)
And it actually needed a reinstall. Just enabling the BIOS setting alone, wasn't enough.
Win98 on the other hand, was still showing artifacts.. even if PnP OS was now Enabled, and I've also reinstalled it's driver (v6.82.016)
The only difference was that now, the artifacts were smaller and would creep up slowly, and within ~10 seconds the system would freeze.
For Win98, the solution was to install a newer driver (v6.83.017) which actually gave me enough moving time (about 15-20 seconds) to enter the Matrox Control Pannel, disable "Use bus mastering" and then quickly restart.
The bad part is that after disabling BUS Mastering in win98, now the performance is almost 50% worse in 3DMark2000, than in XP... 😒
[EDIT:] Ah, and another thing: in order to get those precious seconds of movement in Win98, for me "PCI Delay Transaction" also had to be disabled in BIOS. Otherwise the image was extremely corrupted. But after disabling "Use bus master" in the Matrox C.P., the state of "PCI Delay Transaction" didn't make any difference, and everything worked fine regardless. Even 3DMark gave the same score with or without it enabled.
Hope This will be helpful to those who struggled with the same issue.
Also, any suggestions would be most welcome, on how to make Win98 work with Bus Mastering enabled, so there won't be a performance hit 🙁