AGP slider

[Bayezid]

Hi

I had some slideshow effects in the bigger battles, so I went looking for some help. Found some great ideas However....

I tried to slide the AGP slider over. And it doesn't move.
How can I get it to move?

Athlon Xp2100, Asus A7V8X, 768meg of RAM, Radeon 9500Pro with CAT 3.8. Turtle Beach Santa Cruz.

TIA

[Bayezid]

Forgot...

XP Home

[CBR]

That sounds like PCI texture memory size. I had huge lag in big battles..not good when you have an AMD 2400+, 1024 MB ram and a GF4 TI4800 heh.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_20011120_4051.html

Just reduce to absolute minimum ...2 or something like that.


CBR

[CBR]

Ok this is what happens when you dont read everything sigh.. Radeons are different it seems.

Found this one although it might not help much:

Link

CBR

[Gregoshi]

Hello Bayezid and welcome to the Org.

Thanks for the helping hand CBR.

[Bayezid]

Gentleman

Thank you for the welcome and the reply. I will check it out

[Bayezid]

Tried some of the thoughts in there. ( Changing some of the Tex values in the files ).

No go

I wonder if it just does not see Radeons as AGP cards.

Could be...

[Kraellin]

we've had this problem before. quite frankly, i'm not sure we ever solved it, but have a look in the apothecary and do a search there. i know it's come up before.

K.

[Bayezid]

I been spending a lot of time there

I think you are right, there really is no solution to this one.

Next msiion is to stop the slide show in the laaeger battles. Back to the Apothecary


Right now I am playing the HRE in the early period. My policy has been to develop the infrastructure. I ended up with most of Poland due to marrige. Lost it to a rebellion and took it back. Now I am fighting the GH.

Just waiting for the Swiss pikemen before I take on France.
I am curious though. If I sit just building up an army and treasury, will the other factions fall apart over time?

I won at Shogun that way. All the factions just fell apart into rebel warlords.

[Jacque Schtrapp]

Quote[/b] (Bayezid @ Oct. 14 2003,20:48)]I wonder if it just does not see Radeons as AGP cards.

Could be...

Nope. I have a Radeon 9700 and my slider works just fine.

Check this: If your mboard has onboard video make certain it is disabled in the bios. Check the video settings under the MTW Options screen and make certain that your card is the selected video adapter.

[AlanH_30]

I originally had this problem. I was running on Windows 98se and couldn't move the slider. Once I upgraded to Win2k I could finally move the damn thing

[monkian]

Might be a stupid question but ehre I go-

What should the AGP slider be set to for best perfomance ?

I have an 1.5 Athlon XP, 700 mb+ RAM and a 64mb DDR Geforce2 graphics card.

Any advice would be most appreciated

[Kraellin]

the rule of thumb on agp aperture settings is half your video ram, so in your case with 64mb, set agp to 32mb. but the final rule is...whatever works best.

K.

[Foreign Devil]

I've been having some similar problems with larger battles slowing down... and I've tried adjusting my agp slider to no apparent effect.

The thing is, I have 512mb of ram, but the slider will only go up to 55. What do you make of this?

I have a mobility radeon 7500, if that makes a difference.

[Jacque Schtrapp]

AGP is video memory not system memory. There are lots of things you can try to help with slow downs. Try using only default unit size, turn down pyrotechnics, turn off smoke and ambient fauna, try playing with a lower screen res (800x600), turn down sound quality, and use software instead of hardware for audio.

Before you even start the game use the task manager to close any background programs, you would be surprised at how much of a resource hog something as simple as Norton Antivirus can be. It also wouldn't hurt to defrag the disk drive and remember to shutdown the pc every few days in order to flush the system memory of all the temp junk M$ is holding onto. You can also try upgrading drivers for your vid card.

Good luck

[Bayezid]

No on board video.

The game does see the card, but the slider don't want to move.

There was a setting thaat I changed from PCI to AGP, but it didn't help.

Oh well...... The rest of the game works. Turned off the fauna and turned the pyro down. Helped with the slide show.

[frogbeastegg]

Allow me to contribute my two pence. On my system I can only alter the AGP slider if I have some of my system RAM assigned to my video card. Since this causes horrible lagging and slowdown I have just 6MB (essentially the minimum) assigned to this job and the slider is always unmovable and set to zero. If I assign upwards of 40MB I can move the slider but the game is a slide show. For reference I have a Hercules 3D prophet III with 64MB of onboard RAM and 512MB of system RAM. I get blurry soldier sprites in battles involving more than 500 men but everything else works well, and that is all that matters.

Try altering how much system RAM is assigned to your video card and then try moving the slider.

[ToranagaSama]

Quote[/b] (monkian @ Oct. 16 2003,10:42)]Might be a stupid question but ehre I go-

What should the AGP slider be set to for best perfomance ?

I have an 1.5 Athlon XP, 700 mb+ RAM and a 64mb DDR Geforce2 graphics card.

Any advice would be most appreciated

Not so stupid.

In my experience, I have a Radeon 7500 with 64MB and had it set for the full 64. MTW played just fine no problems everything maxed out.

Started playing HW2 with mucho issues, setting the aperture back to 32MB, and the game plays much better. No effect on MTW.

Kraellin, is quite correct, the general rule is half your VIDEO memory, (duh&#33.

For anyone having slowdowns before turning off features, make sure you have a fairly optimized system.

1) Turn Off your antivirus software when playing.
2) Defragement your harddrive.
3) In the majority of cases do not let Windows manage your Swap File/Virtual Memory. Set a permanent size. The general rule is half your total system memory. 512MB of memory roughly s/b 250-300 megabyte Swap file (500MB is even better).

The best way to set up a Swap File is to create a separate partion to be use only for this purpose. If you're going to use a 500MB Swap, then make the partition at least 600MB.

IMPORTANT:

The NUMBER ONE cause of slowdowns is HEAT

Your system is running hot, effecting the CPU, HDs and Video Card. Its the number one indicator that your system is hot Of course, that's if you don't have a temperture monitor.

So, if you do all the above and still have slowdowns, get yourself a temp monitor. If you have a relatively new motherboard, it will have one or more temperture sensors. Though, too most cases, the only way to read the temperture is through the BIOS--very inconvenient.

If that's your situation then use this:

Most people have inferior System Cases, but don't know it.Motherboard Monitor

While you're downloading, might as well give CacheMan a try, this is a caching software and has a few other tweaks:

CacheMan 5.5

Both are excellent software, supported and consistently updated, OH and they're FREE

Here's an alternative link for both:

PC World downloads

Look down the page for Cacheman, and you might find some other utilities you may link.

If you've got a hot system, the first thing you should do is get a QUALITY system case. You'd be surprised, but most people have inferior cases. Especially, if you've got a Compaq, HP, or even Dell, etc.

Anyway, install Motherboard monitor, setup, setup the logging feature; turn off the system wait 15 minutes or so to let the system cool; turn it on, note the temps; play MTW or some other game for awhile, til you get slowdowns; alt-tab to the desktop and note the temps. You may note a big rise from when the system was cool. Especially, if you get a big jump in the Case temperature, THEN your case is inefficient in removing heat.

Then, turn off the system, take off the case, be care make sure nothing is around it that might spill into it, get rid of the cat, dog, or little children; turn on the system and repeat the above, note the temps. If you're not having slowdowns with the case off, you need a new case.

In the event you're having slowdowns with the case on, then do this, turn off the system, find a desk/table fan and set it directly aimed at the inside of the case toward your cpu and video card; turn the system on, note temps; play a game, note temps.

Any improvements with the case off and/or with the case off and the desk fan----you need a new case and probably more efficient fans, as well.

Do all of the above before spending any money A good case will cost US$50 - $100 (or more), but will last over several system rebuilds, so don't be cheap. Stay away from $20 cases, and a FULL Tower is best.\

---

Hmmm...just realized something, does the slider set the Aperture? My slider is for the AGP speed, and mine is a 4X card. You'd need to check the specs for your card for its capabilities. I'd imagine it can be set higher than 4X.

The Aperture setting is normally set in the--BIOS.

[Kraellin]

ok, time to get technical. this is from www.tweak3d.net

Quote[/b] ]Generally measured in megabytes (MB), AAS is the amount of system memory (RAM) shared with an AGP graphics card in order for it to have more memory to process textures and other visual data.

'AAS' is their abbreviation of 'AGP aperture size'. you've got two types of memory here we're talking about, system memory, which is that memory used by your entire system and comes on those long sticks you insert in your motherboard. you also have video memory, which is located ON your video card. it's actually not as simplistic as those guys are reporting, but that will suffice for now.

agp aperture size is the same sort of thing as pci texture memory, only it's for agp cards instead of pci cards. the pci texture memory also borrows system memory for video memory.

froggy basically has it right. if you turn up agp aperture size, you're effectively cutting your system memory for other uses, which is why on her shorter system memory system it affects other things so drastically and she ends up with a very laggy game. this is why adding another stick of memory can so drastically increase speeds at times. after you hit a certain limit adding more system memory wont help all that much, but increasing or decreasing aperture size or texture memory size, can still.

now, one other thing you shld know, is even though you may have an agp card, you still need to decrease the pci texture memory. windows, in this matter, doesnt care what type of card you have. they automatically reserve texture memory for pci, EVEN IF YOU HAVE AN AGP CARD. this is why we always tell folks in the apothecary to reduce pci texture memory.

the one thing i dont know for sure, is if this pci texture memory is being somehow actually used when you have an agp card or if windows is just reserving it for no good reason, other than caution maybe.

i also dont know exactly how CA did their agp slider. it may be that they are overriding the bios agp aperture setting, or maybe they just made their own little grab-the-system-memory function. dont know.

now, the rule of thumb has always been for me that you set agp aperture to 1/2 of whatever your vid card memory is, but it might work better if you set it to 1/2 of your system memory, since that's what it's borrowing. if you had a 128 meg vid card, but only 64 megs of system ram, setting it to 1/2 of vid memory would eat ALL of the system ram and your system would just bog down. so, it might be better to set it to 1/2 of your system memory.

now, if the slider wont move at all, this is either a bug, or your system is rejecting sharing your system memory with the vid card. this could happen for many different reasons. basically, grapics want to all be in a contiguous block of memory. there's even a special function within your system that makes sure this is so. thus, if you've got a lot of fragmented system memory stuff going on, the agp aperture within the game, might not be able to find any big enough blocks to allocate. you could try a reboot and shutting off all those little idiot programs you dont really need running all the time or on startup and then try adjusting the aperture setting again.

it may also be that there is some conflict on some systems between this in-game slider and your bios aperture setting. you could try adjusting your bios agp aperture setting and see. generally, the default on most machines for the bios agp aperture is 64 megs. so, start there and go up or down by 1 notch and try again.

drivers could also possibly be affecting this in-game slider, but on that, i'm not sure. this only seems to happen with ati cards and isnt consistent. some ati 9700's work ok, and some dont. and that points to either drivers or bios settings or amount of system ram in use or how system ram is being allocated.

and froggy, how are you assigning your system ram to the vid card? i'm curious.

K.

[Kraellin]

one other note on this; if you're getting a 'slideshow' in the game, basically lagging like crazy and the agp slider wont move, i suspect your system memory is all in use, or mostly so. best bet is to free up some system memory by cutting down background processes and services and maybe get another stick of ram. it may also be that CA programmed this to only work when you have X amount of system ram. dont know on that last one though.

does it not move either way and what is it currently set on?

K.

[frogbeastegg]

Quote[/b] (Kraellin @ Oct. 17 2003,20:51)]and froggy, how are you assigning your system ram to the vid card? i'm curious.

It's an option in my advanced video card settings, under D3D settings. The option *used* to be PCI texture settings but it got altered to usable system RAM when I updated my detonator drivers to a DX9 version. The description says that the amount you set will be reserved solely for your video card it is used to boost the amount of effective RAM on your card. It doesn't look like the RAM is used specifically for just one task e.g. PCI textures; rather it is used once the inbuilt 64MB runs out. Or something

[Kraellin]

ah, ok. got it frogster. thanks :) didnt know they'd changed that.

K.