GeForce 3: does it support USWC ?

[Bacchus]

Re-reading my MB manual (Asus P4T), I found something in my Advanced Features that I had overlooked:

Evidently, there is an option (under Video Memory Cache Mode) for USWC(uncachable, speculative write combining), which reportedly is supposed to "...greatly improve the display speed by caching the display data."

Does anybody know if the nVidia GeForce 3 GPU supports this feature? Additionally, can anybody lend any further guidance as to USWC?

 

[trungma]

It doesn't greatly improve your video performance, in fact it will probably cause stability problems. If you're curious, then just enable it and run some benchmarks to see if your score increases.

 

[Bacchus]

Fair enough. Wasn't sure if it would make a difference -- but I guess there's no harm in testing it out.

I'll report back w/my benchmarks before/after, for those who are interested.

 

[Bacchus]

trungma:

Well, you were right. Although I saw a *marginal* increase in performance, it's not anything to shout about.

My 3dMark2001 scores before enabling USWC was 5745.
My scores AFTER enabling USWC was 5747.

Despite FPS, I didn't observe any real difference during operation and gameplay. I think I'll stick to UC.

 

[thetinkerer]

The difference in score is too small to tell. I get scores varying by 10-15 in different runs successively. I also was curious about that USWC and enabled it for my VisionTek GEForce2 Ultra, and everything ran OK but I appeared to get more frequent lockups while running 3DMark 2001. Disabled it again (Back to UC). My bios reported that if the vid card did not support it, the machine might not boot. Didn't have that problem though...

 

[PliotronX]

I've got a GTS which runs fine with either UC or USWC. The only difference is it gets 3438 3DMarks in 3DMark2001 with UC, and 3449 3DMarks with USWC. What a stellar improvement (note the sarcasm) 🙂