G400 Jerk Factor

[WarFlail]

I am not sure what to call this nuisance, so I'll refer to it as the G400 Jerk Factor. :-)

I have been noticing mainly in D3D racing games that when I am travelling in a single direction, after a certain distance travelled, I would see an extremely slight "jerk" or pause in the background graphics. Not a serious jerk, certainly not enough to ruin a game, but just noticeable enough to be a distraction at times. This Jerk Factor is most evident at LAN parties, when I see other people's games running silky smooth with their GeForces and TNT 2 Ultras and mine looks epileptic in comparison.

I used to have a Celeron 333MHz before I got the P3, and the Jerk Factor was there. Before I got the G400, I had a Millennium II and Pure 3D II combo, and there was absolutely no jerkiness there (it was just slow...). Overclocked or not overclocked, 32-bit z-buffer on or off, etc, the G400 Jerk Factor remains.

A friend of mine also has a G400, and I see the same Jerk Factor on his machine (Celeron 450MHz, but otherwise the same setup as my rig).

Has anybody else experienced this? Is there a cure???

-=W=-

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My system specs:
Intel Pentium III 650MHz
Asus P2B motherboard
128MB PC-100 SDRAM
Matrox G400 32MB SH @ 184.50MHz, running ParaKnowYa's driver pack v1.5
Creative Sound Blaster Live! Value with latest drivers
Quantum Fireball ST 6.4GB & 4.3GB
CTX PR711 17" Monitor, currently running 1024x768x32 @ 85Hz
Windows 98 (not SE)
3DMark2000 default benchmark score: 2991
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[archangle]

What games? what resolution?

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Cheers,

archangle

[WarFlail]

Need For Speed III, any resolution
Dirt Track Racing, any resolution
Need For Speed: Porsche Unleased demo, default resolution

I've also noticed the Jerk Factor appearing in Quake 2 unless I limit the framerate to around 30 or so. The Matrox G400 Techdemo also has these jerks. Strange, but looking on the newsgroups, I don't appear to be alone in experiencing this.

One person on the ng suggested deleting a program called MGABG (or something similar) from the registry key HKEY_LOCALMACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run. However, I have not found such a program residing there or anywhere else in my system registry.

-=W=-

[Rik]

'MGABG' is particular to the Windows 2000 drivers only. I think the person who suggested removing it may believe you have the problem of Powerdesk taking too big a chunk of processing time when it's running. To see if this is the case, you can CTRL-ALT-DEL and force powerdesk to close, and then run a game to see if this cures the problem.

[WarFlail]

Rik: Is there a way to prevent PowerDesk from loading on startup, or is that a bad idea?

If I CTRL+ALT+DEL and shut down all background applications (except Explorer and Systray, of course), the jerkiness disappears. Now I have to work out which app was causing the Jerk Factor!

-=W=-

[Ovi]

Hi WarFlail
It's safe to prevent powerdesk from loading at startup.To do that,type msconfig at the 'run' prompt and then uncheck all those programs that you do not want to load at startup.
Cheers
Ovi

[DosFreak]

Hey when I saw the subject of this thread, I thought you were talking about me.

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C:\DOS
C:\DOS\RUN
\RUN\DOS\RUN

[blades]

when i type msconfig i notice that i can make it so that my pc wont read autoexec and config.sys @ start up..isnt that safe enough to do? cause i am not using any dos drivers?

anyone suggestions?

[impact]

How about emptying the config and autoexec files instead? I think there might me some %path% variables in autoexec that you might not want to lose.

Jerk Factor... Hehehe

[Rik]

WarFlail -
I'm glad you found the culprit for your excessive jerking (!!!).

What you can do now is a little trick which someone on these boards discovered which will stop Powerdesk from taking too much processor time. What you do is search through the registry (with regedit) for 'PDEnable', and when you find it change it from '01 00 00 00' to '00 00 00 00'.
Even if Powerdesk is disabled it has the nasty habit of re-appearing if you go to display properties. By using this trick it won't give you any hassle when it re-appears.

Blades -
With Win98SE I have found that I am able to completely eradicate Config.sys, Autoexec.bat and Command.com from the root directory - Windows auto configures dos for default use. This might work for you, although it depends if you have anything special set up in these files (like special paths, stack sizes, etc).
All you can do is keep a copy of these files, delete them from the root directory, try booting without them for a bit and see what happens...

[Jonathan Beilin]

Is there any program equivalent to msconfig for Win2K?... It was a lot faster than regediting...

[DosFreak]

Startup Control Panel
http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml

[Moleman]

Well I have exaclty the same problem, jerkyness all around, tried shutting down everything in running in the background, even Powerdesk, still no luck,I added 128MB more ram and it was still there, Hell I even tried a Geforce2, and the Jerkyness got better but it was still there, man this is driving me insane, so what is my next plan? well Upgrading to 1Ghz and if that doesn't work I think I'm gonna buy a Playstation 2 hehe

[Nick L]

I've heard having a network card may slow down your pc