UT set up help with G400 needed please

[pigseye]

OK, I'm a total newbie at setting up my G400 dual head for Unreal Tournament. Could someone help me please? I'm looking to get the best performance out of my system.

So a few newbie questions

D3D or OpenGL? which one should I use and why?

I'm using the latest driver for the G400, Is there a way to over clock the card? Does it matter? The Matrox utility just crashes when I run it. If I use an older driver (5.30?), it works fine.

Is there anything I should do with my system to help max out performance in UT?

C566 overclocked to 850 MHz in a MSI6905 sloket with a GORB
Abit vt6x4 slot 1 MB
128 MB ram
G400 dual head
10x DVD player (Afreey?)
using on-board sound for now.
Old hdd. I'm waiting for my 7200 30GB WD. should arrive next week


Your suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
pigseye

[omegaRED]

D3D. OpenGL looks much better but you need a BEAST of a machine for it to run smoothly. On your celery, D3D.

Overclocking the card ... on your system, it wont do much. Try MGATweak 1.20b. You need a faster CPU where the G400 will be the bottleneck to have some noticable result by o/cing the card.

Make sure you have disabled VSync, both in Win & in UT. Use MTSTU util to disable it in Windows ... 32BZbuffer (no increase in FPS, but should eliminate some depth errors) In UT, press ~ to get the console, type preferences and scroll down to rendering, D3D, set use32bitZbuffer to true ...

To speed things up, you could disable Dynamic Lightning and Decals. It wont look as pretty, but it`ll run pretty much faster.

[pigseye]

Hi Omegared,
I appreciate your suggestions and especially the rationale you provided for your suggestions. I'll give them try and will do an update post.

My goal is to get everything I can out of this system with the G400 DH for UnReal Tournament.

I had a voodoo 5500 PCI video card before the dual head and UT played much better. I'm not surprised, just trying to get as much performance as I can since I like and need the dual head features (dual monitor, DVD Max, and TV-out.)

Do you know if there is anyway to run the voodoo 5500 PCI card simultaneously with the G400 and then play UT off of the voodoo card? I know windows 98 allows dual cards but when I tried both cards before, they didn't play nice with each other.

Thanks Again,
pigseye

[omegaRED]

Glad i was of help ... i *think* there would be no problem using the 5500 & G400 in your system, but i dont know for sure. You need some of our General HW/SW experts for that. Try searching the Forums for some prev. posts ... i recall stumbling across some posts where people had a G400 plus a VooDoo or other PCI card ... Do a search, you`re bound to find something.

IMO, it is possible to assign all D3D calls to the VooDoo and the DirectDraw to the G400, so that when you run a game, the 5500 kicks in ... but as i said, i`m no expert at this.

Could you elaborate more on the problems you encountered when you tried the 5500 + G400 combo?

[pigseye]

Omegared,
thanks for your interest. I don't know what happened with the voodoo5500 and G400 but the V5500 was installed and had all the drivers loaded first and was operating fine. When I installed the G400 with it, I couldn't get the G400 going and the Voodoo5500 kept working.

Just to get the G400 working so I could assure myself it was functional, I removed the v5 physically (but left the drivers, dumb!) and still had stability issues with the G400 but at least I could get a picture.

Finally I started all over and removed all traces of the V5 and G400 and installed the G400 clean. It's been working pretty good now but still occasionally I get a BSOD when I'm changing from clone to dual or when I change resolution in UT.

Here's is what I suspect, the voodoo5500 was in the PCI slot closest to the AGP slot. I'm wondering the the 2 devices were sharing an IRQ and couldn't handle it. I'll try reinstalling it in a slot wheren they won't share an IRQ.

What do you think?

Thanks,
pigseye

[omegaRED]

You are using W2K, right? Well nevertheless, NEVER put a card in PCI slot 1. I dont recall if it shares IRQs or BusMastering signals with the AGP slot ( consult your MoBo Manual, find a PCI slot that doesnt share IRQ or BusMaster with the AGP ), but its safe to say that you shouldn`t plug a card into PCI 1 ( esp. a Video Card ).

Consult the manual, rearrange the PCI cards if necessary and try again.

[pigseye]

Hi Omegared,
No I'm using win98SE. I'll try again and get back to you. This will be pretty cool if it works. I'll be able to hook up 3 monitors to one machine!

OK that's not my intention but I'm going to use this system as a test machine for dual video cards with the Voodoo 5500. Eventually I want to use the Voodoo 5500 in my main PC with 2 monitors.

Of course, I still want UT to run as best it can in the PC with the G400.

Thanks,
pigseye

[pigseye]

Hi Omegared,
Well I installed the voodoo5500 in my G400 system and it just locks up in the splash screen. I tried 2 different PCI slots but it's late and I'm going to try again later in the week.

I'm concerned that my generic 250 W power supply may not have enough juice for all my stuff. Seems unlikely but the V5500 is the first video card that I have seen that has a molex(?) power connector on it and if it's not plugged into the power supply of the PC, there is no pic.

I'll keep you updated.

thanks,
pigseye