Anonymous Coward wrote on 2021-11-17, 13:24:

feipoa wrote on 2021-11-08, 00:37:

I don't have a Rendition Verite based card. Anything special about it

I once owned a Diamond Stealth S220 new when the card was still relatively current. I was really not impressed. It had the worst 2D output quality of any graphics adapter I'd owned up to that point. I remember the colours being really dim and washed out. Kind of like crappy S3 Virge cards, but worse. I also remember having issues with screen corruption using the drivers it shipped with. It was definitely shitty drivers, not bad RAM. Also, I was not impressed with the 3D performance. Though, to be fair my first experience with 3D graphics was a voodoo3, so that was what I compared it to. I remember to get unreal going smoothly, I had to drop down to 512x384 or some other weird intermediate resolution. I only had this card for a few months before I binned it.
Unless there was some kind of fix for the crappy 2D output, I wouldn't even consider one of these. Are any of the Verite cards better than the S220?

My S220 looks pretty crisp and constrasty up to 1200x1024 on my 19” CRT. Maybe you had a bad card or somehow a lower quality DAC?

The V2100 has an integrated RAMDAC. Mine also looks like shit

Maybe there was an updated BIOS that fixed the problem, kind of like the homebrew fix for the Virge cards.

maxtherabbit wrote on 2021-11-19, 13:54:

The V2100 has an integrated RAMDAC. Mine also looks like shit

Damn, I must of lucked out. Not sure if it matters but I have a revision “A” on latest firmware 1.36.

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2021-11-19, 14:30:

Maybe there was an updated BIOS that fixed the problem, kind of like the homebrew fix for the Virge cards.

I've tried both 1.36 and 1.35. Both look equally bad. 1.36 has the added feature of overclocking the memory and tripping memory errors in VMTCE

@chatdi99

I believe the jumpers reflect how i left them for Am5x86 processor.
Hope this helps.

So, can you snap a good photo of your Rendition screen output ?
I am curious to see how good/bad this actually looks.

Thanks, I’ll see if I can snap a pic later this evening, it’s really tough to get a clean pic from a CRT on a phone. I think it looks almost as good if not as good as a Voodoo 3 or a Riva 128. You can’t push the refresh rates too high though, around 70-75Hz is the sweet spot any higher and yes the image degrades pretty quick, at least on my setup.

What would cause one of these socket 3 motherboards to update the ESCD data on every boot?

Flaky BIOS not maintaining settings ?
I noticed this board is prone to stuff like that.

pshipkov wrote on 2021-11-19, 22:56:

Flaky BIOS not maintaining settings ?
I noticed this board is prone to stuff like that.

Ah frustrating, I had this board running fairly
well at one point. Every other boot Windows is telling me there is something wrong with my display.

This board is troubled.
Feipoa had issues with his too.
Use another one. Not sure why using the GA AMS

I’m using it because it’s the only PCI socket 3 board I have with 1024k cache support out of the box. Also the UMC chipset seems to be the only socket 3 chipset I’ve come across that will run the Rendition with bus mastering, offering a significant performance bump. The Biostar UUD is the next best option but I’ve not gotten around to performing the cache mod.

I can run my tests in DOS so the ESCD issue isn’t a huge deal for now. I had this board running quite well with a Riva128/Voodoo2 combo, it might return to that.

Chadti99 wrote on 2021-11-19, 22:40:

What would cause one of these socket 3 motherboards to update the ESCD data on every boot?

There were "transitional" boards which could be shipped with either an EPROM or EEPROM depending on revision.

My LS-486E is one such board, it could handle a 12V or 5V EEPROM with jumpers that were not soldered from the factory.

Using a later BIOS revision designed for a board with Flash BIOS on a board without the write enable set will result in it attempting to update the ESCD on every boot. This is not indicatve of a problem per se, and the board should operate normally this way.

You may be right. I don't know.
This Gigabyte board is not great. Don't feel like spending any more time with it to find out.
On the mobo here this issue is not present if Dallas RTC module ending on "A" is used.
Feipoa does not seem to have such problem at all, while Chadti99 is seeing it all the time, but that started happening only recently.
Go figure.

I used to have LS-486E in the past and don't remember issues like that, but high chance i didn't try later BIOS on it.

I had no problem with the GIgabyte AM/S board up to 40 MHz with 1024K and an Am5x86-160. Fastest timings worked on the AMD, but were too much for the Cyrix 5x86-120. It wasn't so good above 40 Mhz. If you are having trouble with it, it still may be some jumper or BIOS setting, just like it was on the Asus VLI board. You need to play around some.

Do either of you have a Diamond Stealth64 DRAM-T VLB with 86c764-P chip and BIOS v2.02 and later?

feipoa wrote on 2021-11-20, 09:08:

Do either of you have a Diamond Stealth64 DRAM-T VLB with 86c764-P chip and BIOS v2.02 and later?

Not currently, I saw one go for a hefty amount on eBay recently, what’s the difference between it and the 764-X version?

But i provided you a 2.09 bios already.
Did you forget, or i don't remember ?

Not sure what is the difference between the two.
I see the X model showing up more frequently on PCI cards.
In functionality P and X appear identical.

Anyone know how to get L1 running in WB with an AM5x86 on the Gigabyte GA486AM/S ? The CHKCPU tool says I’m in WT and I’m only getting 100MB/sec L1 throughout compared to the 140MB/sec that @pshipkov is getting.

*UPDATE* JP12 needed 1-2 jumped

So what was the outcome with Rendition.
Is it going to be a viable alternative to voodoo3 on UMC based boards ?