G400 XP Drivers are up !!!

[Kastuvas]

Well the title speaks for itself.
I guess the usual place

http://www.matrox.com/mga/support/drivers/latest/home.cfm

[Kruzin]

There are also updated drivers for G450/G550 there.

Still none for eTV yet though....

[Tempest]

Thank you, thank you!

*fiddling nervously with the driver disk*

[Kastuvas]

Guys how do you enable AGPx1 in win XP i tryed the usual trick with Matrox tweak utility but when i reboot my pc its at AGPx2 again and as you know most of the G400 and mine is not an exeption doesnt work with AGPx2

[R0M]

The current Matrox tweak utility does not support Windows XP. We will be releasing one soon that will support XP so stay tuned,

Regards,

[Kastuvas]

Does this means that we are stuffed for a cuple of weeks? Naa theres got to be a way, there always is.

[R0M]

Nah, I am sure Haig will release it any day now once he gets requests for it. Just be patient, and it will be up before you know it

[Haig]

The hold up is that I'm waiting for results on a new feature we put in for our eTV clients. It should be up early next week the latest.

Haig

[DGhost]

mmm... good drivers... gave performance a healthy bump and seemed to fix the overlay issues i was having....

[EvilDonnyboy]

I've done some initial benchmarking on the 5.72 drivers, and they seem to have the same performance drop as the previous Beta 5.71 drivers. I'm loosing about 100 marks in 3dmark 2001, and about 200 marks in 3Dmark 2000.

I'll do some more benching 2morrow. Quake 3 had a 50% drop in frames witht he beta 5.71 drivers, so i'll be sure to check that out. I don't have Q3 installed right now, otherwise i would've already benched it.

I'm running win2k Pro on the below rig.

edit: i'm thinking, and i think the new drivers might be reverting my G400 back to stock speeds. I use MGA Tweak to oc my G400 and the Clock monitoring tab is checked... so it *should* retain it's oc'd clock settings. well anywaz, I'll do those bench's 2morrow to confirm/deny my suspicions.

[macrotech]

>> as you know most of the G400 and mine is not an exeption doesnt work with AGPx2

Can someone confirm this is a known problem? As stated in another thread I am getting screen corruption problems trying to run a G400MAX with XP along with frequent reboots, caused by an infinite loop problem according to XP.

I was hoping the new drivers would cure this but no joy. One interesting thing I notice though. After installing the Matrox drivers I have to go into Safe Mode to delete them. On restarting normally XP detects the card and loads its own drivers. The PC is then fine and I can change the resolution etc. with no problems. However, as soon as I reboot, having changed nothing, the corruption problem is back. I have now done this three times to prove to myself I am not imagining it. Does this give a clue to the solution?

Thanks,

Kevin

[Maggi]

Hi macrotech,

there where issues with old VIA and ALI chipset based mobos, causing too much noise on the mainboard and thus disturbing the bussystem which resulted in some instabilities at AGP2x with Matrox G series cards.

Matrox cards are more picky about clean bus signals as they are using a superior AGP texturing method (DiME) than a lot of other cards (DMA).

By default Matrox runs an AGP test upon windows startup that determines the maximum safe transfer rate (1x 2x 4x), but I guess those are not nearly as stressfull to the card as a 3D shooter would be and therefore you might have a stable system until you really start pushing it.

Coming back to your prob, I have no idea about XP ...

but it sounds like you're not using the uninstaller form Matrox to get rid of older drivers.

Search for a file named "pduninst.exe" (mine is in D:\WIN2K\system32\PDesk) and run it.
Reboot and upon card detection, point the drivers installer to where you extracted the latest G400 XP drivers.
Reboot, goto the directory of G400 drivers and run setup.exe, reboot and report back if it helped any.

I found out that this the safest way to install any Matrox driver, especially Win2k was picky sometimes.

[EvilDonnyboy]

Ok, either I'm doing something wrong, or these 5.72 drivers are POS. I get just as worse of a performance drop as the last Beta 5.71 drivers did. That's about 100 3dmark 2k1 points and almost a 50% drop in Q3 performance.

I've fully uninstalled the drivers and installed them again 1/2 a dozen times, and same thing. I tried putting my G400 back to default speeds, but that results in even worse perfomance, meaning the drivers aren't putting my G400 back to default speeds by itself.

Is anybody else having these problems?

[Kastuvas]

I didnt have a chance to run Quake III because it doesnt work at the moment but in 3D Mark 2001 i only got 789 in win xp compared to a 1114 in win 98.

[cerb]

XP + Q3A + 5.72 drivers = GOOD!

Just installed and tested the 5.72 drivers and I pretty much got back the performance I lost when upgrading to XP from win2k.

My config doesn't seem as good as it used to, but here's the scores (all in 16bit unfortunately - to lazy to run the tests a second time through. :P )

5.71 betas
640x480 - 40.8 and 39.7
800x600 - 34.2 and 34.5

5.72
640x480 - 64.5 and 64.7
800x600 - 61.2 and 63.0

Much more to my liking. If I get back into playing q3 at all then I'll have to tweak my config and see if I can get it back to the 100-160fps I was getting in ra3.

btw, my specs are:
Athlon Classic 700, Asus K7V, 320meg pc133, SB Live.

/Edit: Oops - forgot to add that I have a Vanilla G400 DH 32MB(not overclocked)