Strange DOS game incompatibility with my GeForce 2 Ultra \ VOGONS

Strange DOS game incompatibility with my GeForce 2 Ultra

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First post, by Kahenraz

Posted on 2022-03-21, 02:50

Kahenraz Offline

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Posts: 4517
Joined: 2004-01-22, 04:57

I've been experimenting with different NVIDIA cards in a ASUS P5A, my first Super Socket 7 motherboard, paired with an AMD K6-2 to find a card/driver combination that would provide good performance. I like to use a GeForce 2 Ultra as a starting point as it is a pinnacle of DirectX 7 performance.

I normally start my tests with driver 56.64, since this has the widest compatibility among cards, then work my way backwards as needed. Something I noticed immediately was that the Unreal flyby demo lagged horribly. This didn't seem right for the era, as Unreal should be playable at this time on this hardware at good frame rates with a powerful enough graphics card. Working back I found that at driver version 12.41 and prior, performance picked up significantly, and the frame rate became smooth and playable. 3DMark 99 scores also went up by almost 40%. But there was a problem. Running DOS games like Duke3D or Doom would cause the system to hard lock at a black screen.

So while I had solved one problem, I had accidentally unearned another. I had to go as far back as driver version 6.5.0 before the problem would go away. This is a very interesting failure mode that I haven't seen before. More testing is needed, as I haven't tried this particular driver combination with this particular test (DOS games in Windows ME) with this particular card.

One thing that is consistent is that, on this platform, performance tanks after driver version 12.41... on the GeForce 2 Ultra. BUT, on a hunch, I swapped in a GeForce 2 MX 400 and the DOS crash went away!

This is a very interesting failure mode, since both the GeForce 2 Ultra and the GeForce 2 MX are very similar cards. I wonder what is causing this problem?

Last edited by Kahenraz on 2022-06-09, 03:39. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 1, by Kahenraz

Posted on 2022-03-21, 03:11

Kahenraz Offline

Rank l33t

Rank: l33t
Posts: 4517
Joined: 2004-01-22, 04:57

I found the problem. It was caused by choosing the "ALL" option under "Frame Buffer Size" in the ALi AGP tweak utility. Changing it to 16MB fixed this issue with DOS games hanging the system. It's now possible to use driver version 12.41 and a GeForce 2 Ultra with good performance on my K6-2.

Performance is still terrible on this system using later drivers, no matter what I tweak. I'm curious whether a K6-2+, K6-III, or a K6-III+ would resolve this, with its local L2 cache.

I had watched Phil's series on GPUs for the Super Socket 7 and found that his benchmarks for the GeForce 3 were lower than what this card is capable of on this platform. For example, I was able to score 3600 points in 3DMark 99 using a GeForce 3 on my slower K6-2 at 550Mhz compared to his K6-3+ at 500Mhz which only scored 3400 points, due to his using much later drivers.

So if you want pixel shaders on Super Socket 7 with NVIDIA, the GeForce 3 seems to be the last card to be useful for this propose.

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