Author Topic: Should "Fast Writes" be enabled? (Read 962 times)

bloom25 · « **Reply #15 on:** November 19, 2003, 06:23:45 PM »

You can probably turn it off in the bios as well.

What does it do? It allows the CPU to directly write some types of data to the video card's local memory, rather than first transfering data to system memory and then from there to the video card. It causes stability problems because it requires very fast memory write timings across the AGP bus, something that is very difficult to achieve on some chipsets and motherboards.

Edit: I suppose it could cause sound stutters, because it could potentially interrupt a DMA memory transfer to the sound card.

AKS\/\/ulfe · « **Reply #16 on:** November 19, 2003, 07:12:31 PM »

What about sideband addressing?

I've enabled it to get some performance increase, but don't recall that far back if I did get a performance increase or not. I don't have any stability problems.

I have an EPoX 8KTA3+ with a Nvidia GeForce4 Ti4200.

I've seen places say it should be enabled, should be disabled, and then say it depends on the hardware.
Thanks.
-SW

bloom25 · « **Reply #17 on:** November 19, 2003, 08:38:59 PM »

I don't think sideband addressing is supported anymore with AGP 8x cards, but what sideband addressing essentially allows is a memory read/write request to be placed before the current memory read/write operation finishes. Essentially it is kind of like a memory queue. It can reduce memory latency slightly (time it takes from request to reception of data), but again I don't think new cards support it anymore.

AKS\/\/ulfe · « **Reply #18 on:** November 19, 2003, 10:03:18 PM »

The Geforce 4 Ti4200 (4x AGP) card I have does, its an option in the driver set anyway.
-SW