Adragan

Kay, Up untill recently I was using an older Matrox Millenium G550 card in my system. Got awesome rates and refreshes on everything from Quake 1 OGL to even the bigger games like SIN and DEUS EX. Have since burnt out my matrox due to a little overclocking mishap and now am using an MSI StarForce card with the NVidia GeForce2 MX100/200 gpu. I'm noticing now that 2D stuff (like a certain SNES emulator) now have really, REALLY terrible framerates, Or stutter a lot, And I can't even run Q2 in anything less than 640x480 smoothly now..

System specs for the box are as follows:

Celeron 600mhz cpu, Genuine intel.
160mb RAM
Abovementioned MSI card.

Any ideas on why this card seems so much slower than the g550? I keep reading everywhere that the GForce2 kicks this card's butt with it's specs, But I'm not seeijng any of this '3D Badness' I keep hearing about.. :P

Could it be a fault of the card? Or does this thing require some tinkering with the MSI clock and core settings? tried the auto-find settings button under properties but all it does is run the test, Go to panel, Go to the test.. in an endless loop.. Can I safely oerclock it? should it matter? My case runs no hotter than about 45degrees c btw..

zeke_mo

ummm....wow....Have you tried running a driver cleaner? Sometimes old drivers get left around and mess up new cards
http://www.drivercleaner.net/
run their program and reboot and then reinstall the newest drivers for your card

---

Adragan

Nah, Ended up having to do a format before the new card was installed anyways. Fresh everything. The card was the second thing I installed. (The monitor came up first)

also noticed that thief1 is the only game so far with OpenGL that runs smothly. even at it's hires of 1024x768x16.. Yet strangely, Thief2 does not.

And thanks for the tool, Noted it down in my tech bookmark spot.

LeeJend

What driver are you using with the MX100? The newer drivers have been optimized for high speed cards and DX9 games. Older drivers may produce better results for OpenGL and an older GPU. Try some drivers from back in the 40 series. I foget which was best. Maybe even something in the upper 30's series.

EDIT
I went back and checked my archive. My favorites were 30.82 and 41.09

Check at "old drivers" for copies. They are 8 and 10 megs respectively so too big to post or email.

---

Adragan

Tried that too, Actually. My Card was even slower/wouldn't work at all when I tried real NVidia drivers, The only one that works anywhere near good is the MSI one for the card itself. Took a few quick shots of the various 'important' panels for the display properties and put em up here. If there's any submenus that might help me, Or settings you're curious about lemme know. I will check on MSI's site to see if they have an archived driver though. Just might work.

Thos pics: http://newdraconia.no-ip.org/~adragan/Settings/

fantasi

is it me or is it because hes running @ 2x. http://newdraconia.no-ip.org/~adraga.../Settings3.jpg

---

Adragan

Yup, That's as high as my pc's board goes. :/

fantasi

so whats the 3dmark on your computer with the mx200?

---

Adragan

Well, Running final reality for benchmarks, Cuz' I'm more interested in the gaming aspect of things. (I mean, Realistically speaking what CAN I do with this old box till I upgrade?) results are as followed. The higher results are from my system when I'm NOT on the net. Needless to say, I turn off the net connection before running anything hardcore on this card.

**NOTE! I previously linked to the wrong images. These are the right ones..**

http://newdraconia.no-ip.org/~adraga...ngs/bench1.jpg
http://newdraconia.no-ip.org/~adraga...ngs/bench2.jpg
http://newdraconia.no-ip.org/~adraga...ngs/bench3.jpg
http://newdraconia.no-ip.org/~adraga...ngs/bench4.jpg

LeeJend

The AGP setting won't make a difference. I played with mine back in the MX days and it never affected FPS or benchmarks. The card & CPU were too slow to challenge the AGP2x bandwidth.

You'll hate this but if you want FPS turn resolution down to 800x600.

Does the MX have less on board RAM than the G550? Stuttering could be from having to load textures from main memory or even the HD since you only have 160MB or RAM.

Can you get any more RAM for that system? Unfortunately, I already gave all my old memory away. You could try adjusting the AGP memory page size in Bios but I doubt if that will help.

---

Adragan

Both this card and the G550 have 32 megs of Ram onboard. From what I saw of the two card's specs though, The G550 had more width for transfers or somesuch. 256 I think as opposed to this card's 128.

Will give those settings and resolution. As for adjusting the memory page size, Is that like the apature size? If so it's already at 64, It's max. (Though have also tried 32)