pouët.net

I realise pouet ain't a tech support site, but seeing as my problem only affects demos, I figure whining here might be somewhat productive. Besides, it'll give you a break from the usual Optimus soap opera.

My new machine runs certain demos (noticeably Candytron, Zeitmachine, and The Popular Demo from Farbrasuch, plus one or two others) too fast -- but only the visuals. Music is normal yet the video slowly creeps further and further ahead.

99% of demos are unaffected, but seeing as I'm currently making something with the Werkzeug1, I'd like to sort this out due to potential timing issues when finalizing my super-duper-hyper-mega-wonderful-amazing demo.

My setup is a Soltek 75FRN2L motherboard w/ Nvidia nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset, 512 megs DDR400 RAM, AthlonXP 3200+ (2.2 GHz w/ 400 FSB), ABit Siluro GeForce4 Ti4200 128 megs, WinXP Pro. Everything that is updatable is updated.

Anybody who gives me useful info will not only receive my gratitude, but also a free cookie. (A chocolatechip.com browser cookie, of course...)

I should also mention that occasionally the aforementioned demos run just fine, but more often than not they don't.

RTFM!

Perhaps your eyes are faster then your ears and the problem lies above your shoulders?? ;-)

btw how farbrausch demos are timed ? frames or milliseconds ? ( yes i'm too fucking lazy to launch werkkzeug and look for synchs )

I would guess that your soundcard is the problem here, replaying stuff on a slightly wrong frequency. If chaos use QueryPerformanceCounter or some other non-soundcard-timer (wich is generally a bad idea for demo because of stuff like this) audio and visuals will become more and more out of sync.

Er, our demos use the "samples played" counter as time source, so this is damn strange :)

Your pc has ADHD :)
Now gimme that cookie! gimme gimme gimme!!!!

It's not the soundcard. I have tried two different cards and the onboard audio. Absolutely no difference. Perhaps its the GFX card...? (I'm going to replace it soonish...)

this may be related to a problem i have here on my work pc.
it has a gf4mx and when i run some demos, sometimes it starts to jitter in this run-a-bit-smootly,-get-stuck,-run-again manner, the getting stuck also involving the sound as well.
this causes e.g. 604 to lose sync after a while.

i haven't tried around with much prods, but e.g. fr-08 also does these little jitters but the music sounds intact and the sync remains in that case.

ryg: okay, nevermind my post then ;)

It may come from nividia's drivers, i already had troubles with a gf4mx on a slower machine (p133), demos were sometimes running extremely slowly, sometimes normally (i'm speaking about entire demos here and not only little parts of them as described above).

Yeah, for a GF4Ti (like I got) I would recommend either ver 43.45 or 44.03 drivers, nothing newer. Also, check your nForce2 drivers. And I'm assuming you have DirectX 9.

Link to older drivers here, btw.

To second phoenix's reply I must say that the driver version 4x.xx denotes development for the GF 4 series of cards. Versions 5x.xx deal with optimizations and fixes for GF 5 series (FX), versions 6x.xx for GF 6xxx etc. I read an article once that proved with benchmarks that if you use newer drivers for older hardware you would have less performance. The same may be true for stability. So uncle phoenix is right. Stick to older drivers and you'll probably be fine :-)

Also, try lowering the 'troubleshooting' slider in the Advanced tab of the display settings control panel a notch. Works for my Radeon.

sagacity: Then, NEVER complain about lack of speed on ANY prod.

Thanks for all the help. I tried everything suggested, but no luck.

In fact...

One thing I forgot to try was flashing the BIOS. So I did just that, using the latest version offered by Soltek. The flash process was successful (DOS style, not via Windows) according to awdflash.exe, and upon rebooting the BIOS was displaying the updated version number, and all the settings could be adjusted as per normal. But after the memory and IDE bootup screen, all I would get is a black screen with a flashing cursor.

Even though the BIOS settings detect all devices correctly, I am now completely unable to boot from anything. So basically the board is a write off.

I've BIOS flashed probably a good 50 times in my life and never had a problem.

But then again, this motherboard has been nothing but a barrel of laughs. It wouldn't run with the first CPU I tried, even thought the processor was good. Then, when it was running with WinXP loaded, I couldn't shutdown. It would always reboot after turning off windows -- I'd have to manually hit power during the reboot process.

Now I'm convinced the timing issues were related to Soltek's wonderful board.

Honestly, I wanted to buy an ASUS board, but this Soltek thing was a birthday gift. The thought was nice, I suppose, but alas...

And for the record, I'm not upset about this, in fact I find it amusing. Besides, everything else about the machine kicks serious butt. (Except the GFX card. Still waiting on an X800.)

Guess I know what I'm doing tomorrow!

hm, sitting in front of ur television? ;P

stefan: well actually turning it down a notch only disables hardware cursors and such, not rendering performance, so that has got nothing to do with it.

ttl: Nope. I don't own and never have owned a TV.

At any rate, bought the new motherboard and voila! No more problems. So the moral of the story is Soltek blows goats.

I was also quite impressed with WinXP Pro: Neither a full re-install nor a "repair" install was required for the new mobo. It simply asked for the driver disk, rebooted once, and presto!!!

(I still feel Windows has shitloads of unnecessary bloat and hides/implements features in awkward places/manners, but at least XP Pro is stable and behaves well.)

sagacity: It prety much kills all 2d accel.