Newbie questions

I've got an ASUS A7N8X - E deluxe
I'm getting flickering in some games. Rome Total War, Warhammer and
Blitzkrieg flicker like crazy. Other games are fine. I have the latest
drivers for my Nvidia 6600 GT AGP card. Could it be I have the wrong drivers
for my motherboard?

This may be a stupid question, but is a bios the same as a driver?

According to Everest it says I have the following bios.
ASUS A7N8X - E deluxe ACPI bios rev 1012
System bios 8/4/04
Video bios 11/05/04

When they say video bios, are they talking about my video card drivers? Like
I said, I'm a newb.

My chipset is an nvidia nforce2 ultra 400

I also get a lot of stuttering in Half Life 2. Do you think this can be
caused by the bios or driver of the motherboard?

In article , "po"
wrote:

I've got an ASUS A7N8X - E deluxe
I'm getting flickering in some games. Rome Total War, Warhammer and
Blitzkrieg flicker like crazy. Other games are fine. I have the latest
drivers for my Nvidia 6600 GT AGP card. Could it be I have the wrong drivers
for my motherboard?

This may be a stupid question, but is a bios the same as a driver?

According to Everest it says I have the following bios.
ASUS A7N8X - E deluxe ACPI bios rev 1012
System bios 8/4/04
Video bios 11/05/04

When they say video bios, are they talking about my video card drivers? Like
I said, I'm a newb.

My chipset is an nvidia nforce2 ultra 400

I also get a lot of stuttering in Half Life 2. Do you think this can be
caused by the bios or driver of the motherboard?

The motherboard BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output Subroutines.
These are computer instructions stored in a electrically erasable
flash memory chip. When the computer starts, and executes the
reset vector, the first instructions it executes come from the
BIOS flash chip.

Any card that plugs into the computer, whether it is a PCI
card or an AGP card, can also have a BIOS chip containing
initialization code. For example, a storage controller (like
an IDE controller) could have some INT 0x13 code, so that while
the OS is booting the computer, if the OS asks that storage card
for a sector of data off a disk drive, the BIOS code on a flash
chip on the storage controller is executed, to get it.

It seems, at least for storage devices like hard drives, that
once the Windows desktop appears, the OS drivers are used to
talk to the hardware, and AFAIK the BIOS INT 0x13 calls are no
longer used.

Three things come in handy, to make a graphics card work:

1) Install chipset drivers for the chipset. For example,
this web page:

http://www.ben.pope.name/a7n8x_faq.html

recommends these chipset drivers:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_udp_winxp_5.10

The chipset drivers are for resources controlled by the
Northbridge and Southbridge chips:

* Audio driver 4.42 (WHQL) Soundstorm etc.
* Audio utilities 4.44
* Ethernet driver 4.42 (WHQL) Nvidia LAN interface
* GART driver 4.36 (WHQL) ---- AGP slot driver
* Memory controller 3.38 (WHQL)
* SMBus driver 4.04 (WHQL) System management bus
* Installer 4.46
IDE NVIDIA driver 4.46 (WHQL) (Do not use. Use Microsoft
default IDE driver instead.)

The GART (Graphics Address Remapping Table) driver does
things like enumerate the AGP interface (so you can see an
AGP entry in Device Manager) and set up the relocation table
for mapping disparate chunks of 3D textures in the system memory.

See "AGP: Saving RAM" on this page:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/agp.htm/printable

Without a chipset driver installed, the OS reverts to slower
transfer methods, and maybe that would cause flickering.

2) Install 6600GT video card drivers. Presumably this provides the
code for the drawing primitives, like OpenGL or D3D. In my
limited experience, you may have to try up to three different
versions of Nvidia or ATI drivers, until you find ones that work
well. For example, the drivers on the CD that came with my ATI
card, actually crashed the computer, and I had to download newer
ones from the ATI site.

3) Install Microsoft DirectX (for D3D). Since Microsoft loves to
add bugs, find the latest ones (9.0c ?).

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/s...n&categoryid=2

4) After many reboots for all of that crap, you should have working
AGP texture transfer and silky smooth performance.

Now, get a copy of Powerstrip he
http://entechtaiwan.net/util/ps.shtm

The Options menu item will show you what is enabled or disabled.
Have a look at that. That is all I use Powerstrip for, is checking
the status of my card. You can also use "dxdiag" from the DirectX
install, to check stuff.

I suppose there could be other reasons for flickering. If maybe
there were two instances of code running, something wrong with
frame buffering, that kind of thing. Do a search in Google and
see if the games you named above, have known flickering bugs,
for which patches are available.

For some old version of Warhammer - Adobe Gamma is implicated:
http://groups.google.ca/groups?threa...ing.google.com

I see in the Nvidia newsgroup, you've already got some answers.
I'd add to that, you should always uninstall the previous card's
drivers, while the previous card is still in the computer. Then
install the new card, and when the computer boots, start installing
the new drivers. In the most extreme cases, you could dig up a
spare disk and do a clean install on it, just to see if using
the first three steps above, you get silky smooth performance.
I had a problem I couldn't fix by putzing around uninstalling
and reinstalling things, and a clean install did it for me.

If you still aren't getting relief, perhaps you should uninstall
the 6600GT drivers, and install your previous video card, and see
whether it has flicker problems with exactly the same games.
Maybe that will tell you whether to suspect the 6600GT or not.

Nobody gets a graphics card to work right the first time they
fire it up, so keep trying. And yes, defective video cards do
ship - you should search Google using the brand and model number
of the company that made your card, in case other people are
finding defective ones. But at least start with the basics,
and see if everything is enabled by using Powerstrip.

HTH,
Paul

Amazing! Tried your driver and it works great. The games with flickering now
run without flickering and other games still work. Only difference is in HL2
one of the numbers keeping track of things is cut in half, but even that
game might be running smoother.
So thanks! I'll try some of that other stuff later.
Far as I can remember there was no flickering problem with my gf4 ti 4600.
It also worked pretty well with nvidias drivers and believe it or not it
mostly worked on the first attempt.


"Paul" wrote in message
...
In article , "po"
wrote:

I've got an ASUS A7N8X - E deluxe
I'm getting flickering in some games. Rome Total War, Warhammer and
Blitzkrieg flicker like crazy. Other games are fine. I have the latest
drivers for my Nvidia 6600 GT AGP card. Could it be I have the wrong
drivers
for my motherboard?

This may be a stupid question, but is a bios the same as a driver?

According to Everest it says I have the following bios.
ASUS A7N8X - E deluxe ACPI bios rev 1012
System bios 8/4/04
Video bios 11/05/04

When they say video bios, are they talking about my video card drivers?
Like
I said, I'm a newb.

My chipset is an nvidia nforce2 ultra 400

I also get a lot of stuttering in Half Life 2. Do you think this can be
caused by the bios or driver of the motherboard?

The motherboard BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output Subroutines.
These are computer instructions stored in a electrically erasable
flash memory chip. When the computer starts, and executes the
reset vector, the first instructions it executes come from the
BIOS flash chip.

Any card that plugs into the computer, whether it is a PCI
card or an AGP card, can also have a BIOS chip containing
initialization code. For example, a storage controller (like
an IDE controller) could have some INT 0x13 code, so that while
the OS is booting the computer, if the OS asks that storage card
for a sector of data off a disk drive, the BIOS code on a flash
chip on the storage controller is executed, to get it.

It seems, at least for storage devices like hard drives, that
once the Windows desktop appears, the OS drivers are used to
talk to the hardware, and AFAIK the BIOS INT 0x13 calls are no
longer used.

Three things come in handy, to make a graphics card work:

1) Install chipset drivers for the chipset. For example,
this web page:

http://www.ben.pope.name/a7n8x_faq.html

recommends these chipset drivers:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_udp_winxp_5.10

The chipset drivers are for resources controlled by the
Northbridge and Southbridge chips:

* Audio driver 4.42 (WHQL) Soundstorm etc.
* Audio utilities 4.44
* Ethernet driver 4.42 (WHQL) Nvidia LAN interface
* GART driver 4.36 (WHQL) ---- AGP slot driver
* Memory controller 3.38 (WHQL)
* SMBus driver 4.04 (WHQL) System management bus
* Installer 4.46
IDE NVIDIA driver 4.46 (WHQL) (Do not use. Use Microsoft
default IDE driver instead.)

The GART (Graphics Address Remapping Table) driver does
things like enumerate the AGP interface (so you can see an
AGP entry in Device Manager) and set up the relocation table
for mapping disparate chunks of 3D textures in the system memory.

See "AGP: Saving RAM" on this page:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/agp.htm/printable

Without a chipset driver installed, the OS reverts to slower
transfer methods, and maybe that would cause flickering.

2) Install 6600GT video card drivers. Presumably this provides the
code for the drawing primitives, like OpenGL or D3D. In my
limited experience, you may have to try up to three different
versions of Nvidia or ATI drivers, until you find ones that work
well. For example, the drivers on the CD that came with my ATI
card, actually crashed the computer, and I had to download newer
ones from the ATI site.

3) Install Microsoft DirectX (for D3D). Since Microsoft loves to
add bugs, find the latest ones (9.0c ?).

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/s...n&categoryid=2

4) After many reboots for all of that crap, you should have working
AGP texture transfer and silky smooth performance.

Now, get a copy of Powerstrip he
http://entechtaiwan.net/util/ps.shtm

The Options menu item will show you what is enabled or disabled.
Have a look at that. That is all I use Powerstrip for, is checking
the status of my card. You can also use "dxdiag" from the DirectX
install, to check stuff.

I suppose there could be other reasons for flickering. If maybe
there were two instances of code running, something wrong with
frame buffering, that kind of thing. Do a search in Google and
see if the games you named above, have known flickering bugs,
for which patches are available.

For some old version of Warhammer - Adobe Gamma is implicated:
http://groups.google.ca/groups?threa...ing.google.com

I see in the Nvidia newsgroup, you've already got some answers.
I'd add to that, you should always uninstall the previous card's
drivers, while the previous card is still in the computer. Then
install the new card, and when the computer boots, start installing
the new drivers. In the most extreme cases, you could dig up a
spare disk and do a clean install on it, just to see if using
the first three steps above, you get silky smooth performance.
I had a problem I couldn't fix by putzing around uninstalling
and reinstalling things, and a clean install did it for me.

If you still aren't getting relief, perhaps you should uninstall
the 6600GT drivers, and install your previous video card, and see
whether it has flicker problems with exactly the same games.
Maybe that will tell you whether to suspect the 6600GT or not.

Nobody gets a graphics card to work right the first time they
fire it up, so keep trying. And yes, defective video cards do
ship - you should search Google using the brand and model number
of the company that made your card, in case other people are
finding defective ones. But at least start with the basics,
and see if everything is enabled by using Powerstrip.

HTH,
Paul