LOSTCIRCUITS

The test system consisted of Shuttle HOT 597, AMD K6-2 400 clocked at 4 x 112 MHz, 64 MB HSDRAM, WDC 22500 HDD, ASUS 40x CDROM, Guillemot Xentor, Windows98.

Installation

Aside from the fact that the driver installation has to be done manually, the Xentor does not like configuring the write combine buffers under DOS. With the stock drivers, the Xentor runs using write combining and even shows a slight performance increase in QuakeII, however, opening any DOS window will crash the machine. Upon upgrading to the Detonator 1.88 drivers, the setup did, at first, not even complete loading of W98 but ended with a shutdown of the monitor. Removing the WC command from the autoexec.bat completely solved this problem. In this regard, it is worth noting that the 1.88 drivers are already optimized for 3Dnow! which may contain instructions also to use the respective MTRRs for write combining. In other words, the monitor shutdown may have been caused by two conflicting instructions in DOS and W98.

Image quality.

With the 300 MHz RAMDAC, it is not surprising that the 2D image quality is outstanding. In addition, there were no deviations noted from the reference images as given in 3D Mark 99 Max.

Performance

In general, the real performance of a graphics adapter cannot be measured without disabling the “wait for vertical synchronization with the monitor” or short “vsync”. The Xentor utilities do not include an option to disable vsync, however, it can be done by editing the registry. Just in case, here is how it works:

From the start menu enter the registry by running regedit. Go to:
HKEY_LOCAL-MACHINE\Software\NVIDIA Corporation\RIVA TNT\Direct3D
and add NOVSYNC as new dword. Modify the value by setting it to 1 instead of 0 as the default. In order to reactivate vsync, all that needs to be done is to either delete the registry entry or set the value back to 0. (Special thanks to James for the tip)

Incoming (gameindex.exe) did not show any particular abnormalities, except that the system maxed out at around 45 frames per second. Upgrading to the latest NVIDIA drivers (1.88) increased the frame rate to about 50 /sec, however, without disabling vsync this appears to be the maximum achievable. With vsync = off, the framerate increased to 75 / 78 fps.

Incoming framerates for the stock and 1.88 drivers with vsync on/off.

Final Reality 1.01

In FR 1.01 the Xentor achieved quite impressive scores with overall numbers of 3.4 (stock drivers), 3.84 (1.88; vsync on) and 3.96 (1.88; vsync off)

3D Mark 99 Max:

3D Mark 99 Max did not show more than a slight increase in performance for the 1.88 drivers. In a way, this is not that surprising since 3D Mark 99 Max by itself already utilizes 3Dnow instructions.

Unreal

In Unreal the Xentor also performs quite impressively, that is, at least, according to the benchmarks. The major weakness here is that the image quality does not nearly reach the standards set by the Savage4 based cards. In general, regardless of the resolution, there was a lack of detail, e.g. the ceiling lights are not ribbed, the walls are lacking some details and the fogging can best be described as a light mist. Nonetheless, the flyby numbers are quite impressive and there is no doubt that the game is playable even at 1024x 768 pixel resolution.

Unreal Flyby timedemo framerates at various resolutions (16bit no vsync).

QuakeIII

QuakeIII runs without any problems at resolutions of 1280 x 960 but since the validity of the benchmarks is not established completely we skip these. For the image quality, the same holds as what was said above for Unreal.

QuakeII

The mother of all first person shooter games had a few surprises. Knowing that the quake engine appears to address every weakness in the AMD K6 processors, the Xentor really takes off here. The only problem encountered was that at or above 1280 x 960 pixel resolution, the screen would display psychodelic colors and the game would immediately freeze.

QuakeII Timedemo 1 framerates, comparing the stock drivers to the agp1.88 TNT2 drivers. In 32bit mode, the system would freeze at 1280x960 resolution

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