What does it mean when the Nvidia driver says you are in "PCI mode"?

[Intelman07]

I have a Geforce 4 TI4200 using 51.75 dets. I also have a P4P800 Deluxe. It is in PCI mode, am I loosing performace?

 

[VIAN]

Its either AGP or PCI, and AGP cannot be in PCI mode or vice-versa.

 

[PhlashFoto]

Crazy drivers, what do they know...

 

[Nuggs]

when I had my old Geforce 2 gts that was an agp card and when i updated the drivers once that came up saying the card was in PCI mode, so I but the old drivers back on and it showed agp x4 mode. When running in PCI mode it made the system quite unstable.

 

[Intelman07]

Originally posted by: VIAN
Its either AGP or PCI, and AGP cannot be in PCI mode or vice-versa.

Well it is.

 

[skace]

Dunno, I think mine is also, I need to check that again tonight.

 

[VIAN]

OK, where does it say it is. Tell me exactly.

 

[Nuggs]

when you og into advanced on your display tab it give you your card type memory etc and pci/agp type.

 

[AtomicX]

im using a Geforce2 MX400 64mb and updated latest Nvidia drivers and it say that mine is in PCI mode well, hmmm....

 

[Nuggs]

my geforce 2 gts never worked with any driver updates i had to run it for 18 months with the original driver's until I changed it.

 

[Intelman07]

I knew i wasn't the only one with this.....but in directx diagnostics it says Accelerated AGP textures disabled and it is greyed out. This worries me. It hasn't said PCI mode before......I'll try a differen't driver.

 

[MichaelZ]

does your motherboard come with AGP / chipset drivers? i have a SIS chipset in my main PC and when I first installed my GF2 MX around 9 months back it was also in PCI mode. I fixed this by installing the SIS AGP drivers on the motherboard CD. haven't had problems since then.

if your motherboard doesn't come with a chipset driver (which i highly doubt) you might wanna try switching back to an old nvidia driver. i got two TI video cards in both my PC's and i run detonator 44.03 drivers. i find these work best for the GF4 Ti series.

 

[Intelman07]

Well it was my chipset drivers...I guess they didn't install correctly the first time. Currious though why do you think the 44.03 drivers are the best? (i'm intrested cause i happen to have a Geforce 4 TI card as i'm sure you know; was it the last drivers nvidia had the geforce 4 line in mind in?)

 

[MichaelZ]

Well you see all versions will work for previous generations of Geforce cards no matter how old. You can pretty much use 51.75 on a TNT2. However, each generation will contain optimizations of some kind. These optimizations do not work perfectly for all generations.

45.23 and higher were all highly Geforce FX biased. They work well to get the FX cards score high in 3Dmark benchmarks and Aquamark 3 but actually have some bugs in real gaming. I'm sure you know Nvidia like to optimize for benchmarks. I've noticed that in real games the 44.03 drivers for Ti yield higher FPS with better image quality. If you're using Ti I wouldn't be using any other driver. The latest drivers have way too much optimizing in them and aren't that great FPS wise in games.

I highly recommend 44.03 if you like things to work like they should without subtle little bugs here and there that the new drivers have. I had a comparson a friend showed me that compared image differences between the latest and 44.03. LOTS OF BUGS!!! Too bad I lost the link. Take my word for it tho mate.

 

[boyRacer]

does it mean you're basically running at AGP 1X?

 

[BFG10K]

PCI mode is very bad and it basically means you'll experience abysmal performance.

To fix it:
-make sure you have the latest BIOS and chipset drivers for your system.
-make sure your AGP aperture is at least 64 MB, raising it to 128 MB or 256 MB if it is.
-make sure you have the latest official drivers from your GPU vendor.

 

[skace]

Which chipset drivers are these... the bios drivers? IE: I have an Asus a7v333 with 1017 bios drivers and I still have this problem.

 

[skace]

Ooooh, I needed the VIA 4in1 drivers. *CRY* I thought those were bad ;(

 

[Jack4KickAss]

On a Geforce 4 card I also recommend the 44.12 drivers. On my old Geforce FX when I installed the 45.23 drivers my 3dmark2001 preformance dropped by a 1000 marks. The new drivers is optimized for Geforce Fx card running 3dmark2003, I don't think they are running very well on directX 8 application, which is primarily what the Geforce 4 was designed for.:beer:

 

[BFG10K]

Ooooh, I needed the VIA 4in1 drivers. *CRY* I thought those were bad ;(

It's bad if you don't have them.