What is the correct setting in the bios for "video bios shadow"

[nippyjun]

What is the correct setting in the bios for "video bios shadow". I'm using windows ME and a geforce 2 pro.

 

[bacillus]

for your hardware I'd choose disable!

 

[nippyjun]

What does it actually do?

 

[PCResources]

It copies (shadows) the video bios from the slower ROM on the videocard to the faster system RAM.

It improves performance on video bios reads... And as the memory it takes up is very small amount it doesn't matter much... However, the OS handles most functions these days so bios reads are not very frequent...

I always choose enabled but that's just me, you probably couldn't tell the difference in performance either way...

Patrick Palm

PC Resources

 

[LordOfAll]

modern software has direct access to hardware. No need to shadow anymore. Just a waste of ram.

 

[Mem]

I`ve all video shadowing disabled,this is the best way for your video card & games stability .

 

[nippyjun]

Thanks guys. Disabled it will be! Now if you can answer my AT Bus clock setting question:


click here to see if you can give me an answer to another question.

 

[jklesel]

you should always choose disable unless your absolutly sure you need it. when you write the video bios to the memory, and the system tries to write to that same memory block, you can run into troubles. just my 2 cents worth

 

[Rand]

It copies the video BIOS on the card the faster system meory for improved performance.
However the OS handles most functions these days and under most modern OS's the software has direct access to the hardware so there is no need.

Disable it, it provides you virtually no benefit nowadays any wastes a very miniscule amount of system memory.

 

[rmblam]

Here is a tidbit from http://www.rojakpot.com/Speed_Demonz/BIOS_Guide/BIOS_Guide_01e.htm

Video BIOS Shadowing

Options : Enabled, Disabled

When this feature is enabled, the Video BIOS is copied to the system RAM for quicker access. Shadowing improves the BIOS' performance because the BIOS can now be read by the CPU through the 64-bit DRAM bus as opposed to the 8-bit XT bus. This seems quite attractive since that's at least a 100x increase in transfer rate and the only price is the loss of some system RAM which is used to mirror the ROM contents.

However, modern operating systems bypass the BIOS completely and access the graphics card's hardware directly. So, no BIOS calls are made and no benefit from BIOS shadowing is realized. In light of this, there's no use in wasting RAM just to shadow the Video BIOS when it's not used at all.

Ryu Connor confirmed this by sending me a link to a Microsoft article about Shadowing BIOS under WinNT 4.0. According to this article, shadowing the BIOS (irrespective of what BIOS it is) does not bring about any performance enhancements because it's not used by WinNT. It will only waste memory. Although the article did not say anything about Win9x, it's the same for Win9x as it's based on the same Win32 architecture.

Not only that, some manuals also allude to the possibility of system instability when certain games access the RAM region that has already been used to shadow the Video BIOS. However, this is no longer an issue as the shadowed RAM region has been moved far from the reach of programs.

(more at the link)