40.72 Class Drivers and VIA Sideband Addressing

[Guest]

I recently changed to the Omega tweaked NVidia 40.72 driver and would like to stay with this guy, except for one problem! I can no longer disable the VIA Sideband Addressing using the NvMax tool. I have tried to directly edit the VIAGART and NVtweak sections of the Win/Me registry, but to no avail. If I can't disable SBA, I loose about half the pixel fill rate; which is just too much of performance hit on loading ground textures. Any further suggestions out there?My system is a Compaq P3/867/512M/GeForce4-4600. Formerly was using Omega 30.82 driver.Thanks for your assistance,Todd Rauppius

[Guest]

Hi Todd,Try Rivatuner. It has an option to force sideband adressing though I am not sure if it really effective. If my memory serves correct, the function depends on video BIOS that support it or not. If it is driver dependent, why not try Nvidia's house made 40.72? The benefit of which you might expect from Omega driver can be attained with Rivature by LOD bias setting.Yuki

[Guest]

Thanks for the suggestion, Yuki. That might just work OK, as I already experimented with the official NVidia 40.72 driver a few weeks ago, and it did not overwrite/supercede the sideband defeat setting. Pixel fill rates where quite high, but the visual appearance in FS2k2 was dissapointing. I will try them again, but this time use RIVATUNE to adjust tweak the LOD. As I have not used this tool before, do you have any leads on good settings?Thanks again,Todd

[Guest gasebah]

Todd,what am I getting wrong here? Sideband adressing was invented to allow for faster communication between the processor and the card by opening an additional channel at the AGP. So normally it is only disabled if you have stability problems. So why would anybody want to disable it, except to add some stability?Please fill me in.Alex

[Guest PaulL01]

Todd,>If I can't disable SBA, I loose about half the >pixel fill rate; which is just too much of performance hit I'am sure this is not the case at all, You may want to disable Fastwrites for slightly better performance (sometimes) or you may want to disable FW or SBA etc if you have stability problems and in that case...If you are familiar with editing the windows regestry you can change:Note: I had to change the brackets as the Avsim forum software will not allow for any text between normal brackets to be displayed...{HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareNVIDIA CorporationGlobalSystem}"EnableIrongateSBA"=dword:00000001to:{HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareNVIDIA CorporationGlobalSystem}"DisableIrongateSBA"=dword:00000000But back up your reg first and you are on your own.But again, I would recommend you take a look at some bench marks comparing the various AGP settings before you make the jump.Here is some decent info for you:http://discuss.madonion.com/forum/showflat...&Number=1075973Take care

[Guest]

Alex, et alOrdinarily that is what you would expect (i.e. SBA is good for performance). But my own objective testing with 3DMarks 2000 & 2001 shows substantially better pixel fill rates (approx. 2 times faster) when SBA is deactivated. My system is well-tuned and gets very sharp rendering of all of the textures, but suffers from a relatively slow memory bandwidth that results in slow loading of the more complex texture maps. Sometimes I have to pause FS2k2 or set the frame rate limiter at 16 fps in order to get the scenery to load and sharpen properly. Yuki's suggestion about Riva Tuner worked fine. I have installed the 41.09 drivers and used Riva to turn of SBA and set the LOD at -1, etc. So far so good, still evaluating the quality and smoothness compared to 30.82. By the way, I think the reference to "Irongate SBA" is for AMD processor equipped systems.Thanks to all,