First post, by RayeR
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hi,
I got some used EVGA GTX 670 for repair and made it working again. Of course I was curious how well or bad has developed the nVidia VBE implementation - how much the card will be usable also for DOS gaming.
It pretend to have 14MB framebuffer as usual and supports VBE 3.0 with all common modes (including 1600x1200/8/16/32 for my 4:3 LCD). It passed my VESATEST with 2,8GB/s transfer rate.
OK, but then I had found serious problem in Blood and DN3D where I see a strange flickering almost all time during play:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV6EAeP8sI8
Unfortunately the flickering remains when I select a different resolution (tried all available, incl. 320x200) just a rate of flickering changes a little bit. In fact it makes these games unplayable 🙁 On my current old 7900GT I have similar problem only at 1280x1024 and higher resolution and only at bottom side (HUD) of screen and not all time so it was playable. In lower res. it was absolutely flicker free. I also tried 8600GT and GT230 that also don't suffer such problem. So it seems that nVidia fucked something up in recent videoBIOS.
Did you experienced this behavior too? Is there any solution - a patch for game or TSR? If cards from other manufacturers don't have this problem I could reflash the videoBIOS. I found a note for S3VBEFIX utility made by other member here that it should fix flickering on S3 cards so I hope there maybe also solution for nvidias.
Later I found that some flickering is also happening in Quake 1 (original engine) but it's more regular than random and ONLY in some resolutions while other res. are absolutely flicker-free so I can easily select a non-flicker one. Any other games and demos I tried didn't suffer flickering.
And the second problem is that this VBIOS doesn't support 8x14 font that some old progs and games use. It should be fixed by this tool:
https://www.bttr-software.de/products/fix8x14/
In my case I found a messed up font in game menu of Commander Keen 4 but I'm not sure if it has the same cause (fix8x14 tool didn't helped here).
Gigabyte GA-P67-DS3-B3, Core i7-2600K @4,5GHz, 8GB DDR3, 128GB SSD, GTX970(GF7900GT), SB Audigy + YMF724F + DreamBlaster combo + LPC2ISA
