284376

GeForce2 GTS Flashing Problem

HelpMePleez

January 11th, 2001 11:37 PM

My GeForce2 GTS seems to run fine during Q3 and UT Gameplay, but in the menus on UT it seems to flash/flickers for a split second. Also in Monkey Island 4 the problem seems to occur more. It may be due to some 2d problems but Im not sure. Im not o/c'd or using leaked drivers. Any clues?

284377

January 13th, 2001 09:38 AM

Some general suggestions:

- Do NOT use beta drivers for the video card - use only the latest official reference drivers (v6.31). Get them here: http://www.nvidia.com/products.nsf/h...etonator3.html

- Remove any utilities for your old video card (Voodoo cards for instance install 3Dfx tools which MUST be removed via the Add/Remove icon in Control Panel). Also, you should ALWAYS change the video driver to "Standard VGA" first before swapping cards to purge the old driver. If you didn't do that before, do it now. Change it to "Standard VGA", reboot and it'll redetect the geforce and ask you for drivers.

- If you're overclocking (either the vid card or the cpu), don't and see if that helps.

- In the motherboard's BIOS menu, make sure that "Assign IRQ to VGA" is enabled and that both "Video BIOS Caching" and "Video Ram Shadow" are disabled. Set "AGP Aperature" to 64.

- If you have AGP 4x enabled (assuming your mobo supports it), disable it - many mobos don't properly support AGP 4x.

- The Geforce does NOT like to share an IRQ with other devices - make sure it's the only card using it's IRQ.

- Go to the mobo manufacturer's web site and see if there's an updated Flash BIOS for your mobo. It could be your AGP bus support isn't up to spec.

- You may not have the proper or the latest drivers for you mobo's APG to PCI Bridge. The Geforce is a true AGP card (unlike 3Dfx cards) and is very fussy about having the AGP bus setup properly. This is a MAJOR gotcha. Windows will install the wrong mobo drivers until you update them. There should be drivers that came with mobo on a CD, but you should download the latest version from the mobo manufacurer's web site.

- It's possible that some other device is causing the problem. Best way to isolate it is to pull ALL your cards except the vid card (IMPORTANT: note what slot each card was installed in). Play the misbehaving game and see if it runs stable (yes, the game should run just fine without a sound card installed). If it behaves, install each card ONE BY ONE starting with the sound card until you isolate the bad boy. It's important to put the cards back in their original slots to avoid PCI IRQ Sharing problems (see next paragraph).

- You may have a card that has a PCI IRQ channel sharing problem (NOT the same as an IRQ conflict). The SBLive, NICs and SCSI controllers are very prone to this. Fix is essentially the same as mentioned in the previous paragraph except when you find the misbehaving card, you need to move it to another slot. More details on this problem here: http://soldcentralfl.com/quakecoop/glfaq5.htm#5_9

- You may have a device with unstable drivers - could be ANYTHING. Make sure you have the latest drivers for ALL your peripherals. Even a misbehaved scanner driver can lockup a system.

- You may have background app running causing problems. I like to run a very clean system when play - I want NOTHING running in the background. Don't run anything in the background: Virus Scanners, disk utils, reminder programs, taskbar shortcuts for Real Player, AOL Instant Messenger, etc). If you have Win98 run MSCONFIG.EXE click on the Startup tab. Uncheck anything you don't need running - Windows ONLY requires System Tray, Task Monitor and Power Profile to run properly (and you can lose Power Profile if your computer doesn't use sleep mode). Uncheck everything else unless it's required by something.

Hope this helps...

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The Flying Penguin
http://TheFlyingPenguin.com