fast writes and winME?

[aznx]

hey guys, im was just wondering if anyone knew how to enable fastwrites in winME? i have fast writes enabled in the bios, my video card supports fast writes, but sandra shows that it isnt enabled in windows. I have the abit kt7-raid and a leadtek winfast geforce 2MX. if anyon eknows how to make this work please reply. thanks

 

[Shooters]

Sandra is often wrong.....this wouldn't be the first time. If you have it enabled in the BIOS then you should be okay.

 

[Ausm]

That is not neccesarily correct....I had an Asus p3V4X mobo with fast writes and 4X AGp enabled...well to make a long story short it was not enabled in reality. That is why I migrated to an Intel 815 chipset mobo.

Ausm

 

[aznx]

well whenever i run win2k, q3a runs more smoothly than in win 9x. so i figure its enabled in win2k. but because of refresh and sound problems with q3a on win2k i went back to win9x. so i doubt that sandra is wrong, there must be a way to make win9x enable it right? maybe a reg fix or something?

 

[EvilDonnyboy]

Fast writes don't do anything. It has no noticable effect on any vid card with any Mobo on the market. I dunno why ausm would switch mobo's just for FastWrite capability. If you do manage to get Fast-writes to work correctly, your looking at frations of FPS increases. It's likely your gonna get a perfomance decrease.

And most driver's from most manufacturer's disable FW by default. Thats to get around any problems FW might cause. After all, FW doesn't give any real-world performance increase.

 

[aznx]

if fastwrites doesnt do anything, can u explain to me how Q3A runs so much better in win2k than win9x? not just in Q3A but in evreything, like when i minimize a window it animates faster. could it be better opengl?

 

[SUOrangeman]

I'm not going to try to be an expert on the subject, but the basic nature of NT/Win2K involves the HAL, which is a layer of code that lies between programs/drivers and the actual hardware. With Win9x, programs "talk" directly with the hardware. Sometimes, the HAL may be written to improve performance on one level and the performance may be lacking in other areas.

WinNT4/2K is a completely different beast than the Win9x line. Just because one side performs better than the other may not mean that something is "wrong" or missing or disabled. I don't think it is valid to expect the same level of performance on both sides. If they performed the same, why would we need both?

-SUO