Disabling PCI Bus Retries.

[Bones]

Evenin guys n gals, got a weird one here;

The other day whilst looking over the Hoontech C-port sound card I met an unusual PC salesman. This one actually knows about DAW setup....WOW!

Anyways, he said that the reason I have to turn down my Graphics Hardware Acceleration is that the Vid card is hogging the PCI bus. (I get 15 tracks without backing it off 2 notches and 60+ if I do)

The side effect is that the screen takes 1/2 a second to redraw

Apparently the way around this is to disable the PCI Bus reties in the Vid card options, woohoo!.

Umm, mine does'nt have this option.

The other way is to edit the system Registry manually and tell the Video to pull it's bloody head in and just do it's job without all the pomp n fuss.

Anyone know how? I sure don't!

Cheers people

Bones

 

[pglewis]

I think this is what he's talking about:

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~jdr8d/papers/hotos7/hotos7.html
Check section 4.5 "Problem: Antisocial Video Cards"

http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/news/trends/t980619a.htm
A specific article on the subject.

The hack is that some video cards just blindly write to the PCI bus without checking to see if it's ready for data first. If the timing is right and the bus is ready, then the card saved a bus read and shows a slightly higher performance on benchmarks. But if the bus isn't ready, the whole system sits and waits for the PCI bus to finish it's business and accept the new data (it even blocks the clock interrupt!).

Most cards that do this nasty bad thing have an option to disable it, but how to do it depends on the card... check your docs. Not all cards use this hack, though. And some driver programmers might do this without even knowing they're doing anything wrong (and might not have an option to disable it). Those would be more rare, though, as most of the "bigger" manufacturers are aware of it.

 

[Bones]

Thanx for your reply pglewis, indeed that looks to be the issue, only problem is that I don't know how to turn it off.

I have contacted the support for my TNT2 m64 V/C but am still waiting for a response.

Does anyone actually know how to shut this off?

Thanx
Bones