Elsa Gladiac MX problems with 3D games

[Perryg114]

Well from reading the posts it sounds like my problems with the card are unique. Problems are games like motocross madness one and two, Unreal Tournament, Crimson Skies. There is a pause that occurs if you are moving relative to the background. It happens at all resolutions and it occurs about once every second or two. This happens on two different motherboards Abit VH6 and ASUS P3V4X with P-III 800 and Celeron 667 processors. I tried another card of the same type and the problem is still there. However, putting in a TNT2 card the problems get alot better. The same games run much smoother on my Compaq P-III 500 machine at work with a wimpy Matrox G200 Video card. I have tried Elsa and Detonator drivers, also loaded the latest via chipset drivers. Have tried turbo and no-turbo modes as well as 1x and 4x AGP speeds. So why does a so called superior 3D card have really poor performance compared to a much slower card in a much slower machine. I also got rid of the bios shadowing. Nothing seems to help. Are these new card only designed to be run on one or two of the latest and games or what. HELP

Perry

 

[Actaeon]

Try getting the latest non-beta drivers for your card. I have no problems with my MX.

 

[Perryg114]

Well I tried the Elsa drivers that came with the card and the Dentonator 3 drivers. They both did the same thing. What drivers would you recommend and who has them.

Perry

 

[BenSkywalker]

Can you list your full system specs(including OS and DX revision)?

 

[Perryg114]

Ok well I have:

Hardware: ABIT VH6 motherboard with a P-III 800, 133 FSB, with 128 M of 133 SDRAM. I have doubled the ram to 256 with no improvement. The chipset is the VIA VT82C694X and VT82C686A. The video card is an Elsa Gladiac MX which has the NVIDIA GF2-MX chipset. I have a 30 GIG, 5400 RPM, Western Digital Hard Drive. I am using the onboard Sound Blaster 128 sound card. I have no devices in PCI slot #1. I also have a PCI TV card and a PCI modem installed but the video problems predate their installation.

Software: I am using Windows 98 SE with direct X 8.0. I was using 7.0 and had the same problem. I have loaded the latest Via chipset drivers off the Via web page (version 4in1425). I am using the Detonator 3 drivers from the NVIDIA web sight( version 4.12.01.0631, 09/20/2000). There are no conflicts in device manager.

Here is a sight that has the motherboard specs

http://www.motherboards.com/catalog...&subcategory_id=7&products_id=31&

 

[novice]

My boys have commented about similar stuttering problems with Motocross Madness 2 on our machines with the Geforce MX as well. They claim the old voodoo 3 3000 gave smoother performance, although not nearly as detailed. I haven't noticed any problems with UT or Q3. I wonder if it might just be a bug in the drivers or the software of the game itself.
Chuck

 

[Perryg114]

Well I have noticed the problem with just about all the newer 3D games that I have tried including UT. When you move forward you can see the background jump periodically not randomly like I see in the older slower video cards that I have tried. Maybe the MX produces too much useless detail and gets bogged down. If so you would think that lowering the resolution would help but it does not. It seems like smooth fluid "lifelike" motions would tend to provide a more realistic gaming experience unlike the MX card.

Perry

 

[Cerb]

Did you get just this video card? Like moving from ATI or 3Dfx to NVidia? If so, you might want to try a good ol' format and re-install.

 

[Mem]

Try this,



<< Q. Games stutter with my GeForce. How can I fix it?
Make sure you have the latest drivers installed.

The following solution is outlined on this page:
http://www.daytonsmisc.com/article1.htm

Go into the System Control Panel, click on Device Manager, and find your CD/DVD-ROM drive(s) and hard drive(s). Go into each one, click on Settings and tick DMA. This enables UltraDMA.

Make a permenant swap file of 150MB. In the System Control Panel, click on Performance and select Virtual Memory. Select 'Let me select my own virtual memory settings', select the hard drive that you want the swapfile on (the fastest drive) and type 150 in both boxes. Click OK, ignore the warning and restart.

Make sure that Video BIOS shadowing is disabled in your BIOS.

Make sure that your GeForce card is not sharing any IRQs with another card - the only device that can have the same IRQ is the 'IRQ Holder for PCI Steering'. If you find that the GeForce is sharing an IRQ, try moving the card that it is sharing the IRQ with to another slot.

If your AGP Aperture is set to 256MB, try changing your AGP Aperture to another value (keep it above 16 as setting it at or below 16 will disable AGP) - see the 'How can I change my AGP Aperture size?' question.

You may find that switching your desktop colour depth to 256 colours helps with stuttering problems.

You can try disabling auto-mipmapping in the control panel. This has helped some people with stuttering problems: however, it may result in reduced image quality and overall speed. >>



ALSO make sure FSAA is disabled,&amp; nothing like Anti-virus is running in the background etc.

 

[Kingofcomputer]

I had Elsa MX and returned,
it always freeze in IE and 3D stuff but 3dmark, no matter what driver, what agp setting, what bios setting.
my mb is Epox 8kta2 and Epox zx370a (at first I thought it's via problem, but how come same problem happens in intel chipset system).

Don't waste your time, get rid of Elsa mx.

 

[Perryg114]

Well I tried all the things that you said to try. The Elsa tech said to do the same thing. I did get it to work without stuttering by unloading just about everything in resident memory. However, the motions were still not very smooth and there seemed to be a lag and unpredicatable response to input especially from a joy stick. I am still experimenting. The funny thing is putting in a slower TNT2 M64 card all these problems go away. So overall I am not impressed with the so called superior quality and speed MX card. I have not had a chance to fully evaluate things but at this point I am not real optimistic that the MX will ever preform as good as the off brand TNT2 M64 card that I paid $45. THe MX was around $130. The store won't take it back without a 15% restocking fee. Maybe ELSA will trade me a GF 256 card that is supposed to be just as fast as the MX. Maybe there is a driver problem here.

Perry

 

[PeAK]

The phenomena you are seeing could be due to some benchmark enhancing driver features that do not work out well in the real world. See the following link on &quot;Queued Frames&quot; . In the driver arena, there are other things that can be done to take one step forward but then two steps backwards. Caveat emptor.

 

[Perryg114]

Ok well all that is good info and I do realize that there is an over emphasis on making these canned tests look good without a consideration of actually playability. So what the hell do you do about it in the case of the MX. THe same drivers are running the TNT2 M64 card so it must be something specific to the card and how it uses the drivers. I also realize it is hard to catagorize realizm since it is so subjective. I do know that the older card appears to perform better. So what drivers do I use to make my MX card work correctly reguardless of frame rate concerns. The reading to many frames ahead sounds like the problem but how do I fix it.

Perry

 

[Kingofcomputer]

It must be ELSA's problem.
I've heard many wonderful working Inno3D mx on every mb.

 

[airfoil]

I'll second that, coz I have one.

 

[Perryg114]

Well I did get the card working and its doing ok but it is still not as smooth as the older slower TNT2 M64 card. I can't really tell any difference between the detail level of the MX versus the TNT2 M64. The MX seems to have more pauses and the motion appears to be more jerky and control inputs seems to be more unpredictable. Even in Unreal Tournament at the same resolution the MX is not near as smooth a fluid as the TNT2. Now in 2D its just the opposite. The MX blows the TNT2 away. It scrolls much smoother and is alot sharper. Also the MX in 3D is very intolerant of any memory resident junk that is always loaded when you install new software. The only way to get it to work properly is to unload all of that stuff by using the task manager. It may be one program but for now I just unloaded them all. Now the TNT2 works fine with this stuff loaded. So my next question is why spend all this money if there is no performance increase in real gameplay.

Perry

 

[Perryg114]

Well after comparing both cards in the same machine I have determined that the MX is working properly. The MX is very sensitive to anything running in the background much more so than the TNT2 M64 card that I compared it with. It will not work well till you go into task manager and delete everthing that is not essiential. So anyway it was a simple fix.

Perry

 

[mechBgon]

Just for the record, a friend of mine found that the intermittent pauses in his UT games were being caused by... the incorrect mouse driver, of all things.