G400Max is hard on games

[Jim Lee]

Dear Guru and Friends,

I have replaced the old trusty STBv4000 with the G400Max three days ago. While the latter provides excellent image quality particularly for watching DVD, it also comes with it numerous compatibility problems with 3D games in common. I have encountered the following difficulties which have yet to be resolved (even after reading the post here)

1 When running Half Life (v1.10) in 1024x768 resoution under D3D, exiting the game screen to the main menu (e.g. for restoring a previously saved game)will produce a totally corrupted game display upon return. The only way out is to quit game and restart.

2. The problem in (1) does not occur at 640x480 resolution and that includes OGL.

3. Selecting display properties by right clicking on an empty space of ther desktop takes about 20s to bring up the properties sheet. This is an unduly long delay compared to other display cards that I had in the past.

I am running a P3-450 (overdriven to 504 for more than 8 months with no problems for the STBv4400), Sony 400PS monitor, SBLive value and the G400Max is running the 5.25 pd and BIOS is v1.5

I have read about the conflicts between G400Max and SBLive but my configuration assigns different interrupts to the 2 devices. Disabling video ROM shadowing is of no help, neither is restoring the older 5.13 driver.

Any helpful pointer will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Jim

[Kruzin]

1&2 : There is a know problem with the latest drivers and HL in D3D showing the text. However, HL is not a true D3D game. It was coded in OGL, and that's where it looks best. Do a search for HL in this forum, and you will find plenty of threads from the last 2 weeks discussing these issues.

3 : Sounds like there are still remenants of your old video drivers. The display properties will come up slow if Winblows is trying to find a card that is no longer there...

[deejay]

Hi Jim,

On point one, I've seen a suggestion to try your desk top at 16 bit colour to solve the garbled screen effect. Didn't work for me but its worth a try ,I resorted to using the quick save(f6) and load (f7), got through the whole game no probs.
Cheers

Dave.

[Tommy_D]

I had a similar problem with the G400 and Matrox was very helpful.

First off, make sure that the PCI slot underneath your AGP (G400 card) is empty. For the G400 to work to the best of it's abilities, it must not share an IRQ. The two slots tend to share this IRQ .. and if you have for instance a sound card .. it won't perform to the MAX capabilities.

Second, the particular problem with Half Life is addressed in the 5.21+ drivers for the card. I had the exact same problem, and after I switched cards and installed the new drivers, the game ran beatuifully in D3D.

Get the OpenGL support driver from Matrox. It can be found on matroxusers.com. Unzip it into your Windows/System/ directory, and choose default driver for OpenGL in Half Life. You should notice a pretty nice performace increase.

If you have any questions, feel free to mail me .. I know how much of a pain this problem can be.

[Jim Lee]

Dear Kruzin,

How do I clear the remant video drivers for sure? I have removed all Nvidia files, cleansed the registry. The only place left is properly the binary database windows uses and I have no way to edit that. (Isn't windows NOT supposed to remember the old video drivers?)

In the meanwhile, HL plays better in the OGL mode than the D3D mode (and this is contrary to some of the posts here). However, I think Matrox owes all of us better drivers. They are far less polished in this aspect compared to Nivia and 3dfx.

Thanks

Jim