Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: Wanker on November 14, 2003, 09:34:36 PM
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Was looking through the tabs on the 3.8 catalyst drivers and noticed that I have "fast writes" disabled. What do "fast writes" do, and should I have this enabled?
Video card is the Radeon 9800 Pro.
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No, I'd strongly recommend leaving it off. It typically gives extremely little to no performance gain, and there can be stability problems on a lot of systems with it enabled.
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nothin but trouble. leave it disabled.
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Interesting. I just went and took a look at my tabs, 'cause I thought mine was "on". And it is. Always has been, I think.
No stability problems at all. WBIII, MOHAA, Call of Duty Demo, etc all work fine. (Radeon9500 Pro, Epox 8RDA3+, Barton2500, WinXP)
*shrug*
BB
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Well, I have a confession to make. After seeing that it was off, I turned it on, and immediately got a 5 fps increase in the AHII beta video tests.
But then when I logged into WWIIOL last night, I was getting some strange stuttering and some sound anomolies that had never been there before. Recognizing that this is the only thing that has changed in my system, I went back and turned it off. That eliminated my problems in WWIIOL.
So, I guess I'll be leaving it off, permanently.
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I've had some unstability with it too.
BTW banana, check this http://www.fanta.dk/showmovie.asp?mid=45FFFA94-0CF1-4CDA-8967-4E75C0A359A8
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:lol
:aok
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Glad I read this. I've got a Radeon 9600. By default, fast writes were on. I was getting two different problems. [list=1]
- A strange DDhelp error message - typical Microsoft error message. An error has been reported, but they don't actually tell you what the error is. I found that this message has come from DirectX... currently running 9.0b.
- Crashes to desktop after about 5 minutes online play.
So I have disabled fast writes, and initial tests indicate that both problems have been solved.
Before the change, the Radeon 9600 was giving me triple digit frame rates - anything up to 120fps. Now, I'm getting a much more consistent 75fps.
The AH video setup panel has a feature which allows max frame rate to be limited to 60 or 45 - was this feature designed to achieve the same thing as is achieved by turning off Fast Writes?
About that 9600. I went and bought it retail after I realised I was in deadlock with my supplier over the suspect 9800. I'm getting a refund. The 9600 works just fine. Surely 75fps is good enough for games like AH?
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I have fastwrite enabled on a A78NX deluxe and a radeon 9600
I've no problem so far with : OPF , AH ,IL2,IL2-FB
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Before the change, the Radeon 9600 was giving me triple digit frame rates - anything up to 120fps. Now, I'm getting a much more consistent 75fps.
beetle, are you sure you didn't also turn vsync on as well when you turned fast writes off?
It sounds like you're pegged at your monitor's vertical refresh rate of 75.
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I just turned fastwrites off to see if my sound lockups were caused by it. So far I have no problems w sound. But this is not a clean test as i am experimenting w overclocking also.
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Originally posted by banana
beetle, are you sure you didn't also turn vsync on as well when you turned fast writes off?
I didn't change vsync. I can't even find that setting anywhere. Where is it?
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After removing my audigy card and using onboard 5.1 sound I noticed occasional sound stutters with vid card overclocked, turning off fastwrites fixed the problem with no noticable loss of fps.
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Originally posted by beet1e
I didn't change vsync. I can't even find that setting anywhere. Where is it?
To be honest, I don't know, either. It's in there in one of the tabs, probably.
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For nvidia it's under the agp tab, dont know about ati.
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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.
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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
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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.
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The Geforce 4 Ti4200 (4x AGP) card I have does, its an option in the driver set anyway.
-SW