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Technology Stocks : 3DFX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (8096)	10/9/1998 4:33:00 PM
From: Chip Anderson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 16960

I'll take a crack at your Banshee questions. Keep in mind that I have a Raven card though. (1) The driver installation said that my existing glide.dll and glide3 driver (glide3.dll?) were more recent than what shipped with the box. To be on the "safe" side I chose to replace everything I had with what came from the box. Was this a mistake? Yes and no. (I'm assuming you have a Voodoo/Voodoo2 card in the same system, yes?) The installation program installed "Banshee" versions of the Glide drivers and overwrote the "Voodoo" versions of those same drivers. If you want to use both cards, you need both sets of drivers. There is a batchfile on the CreativeLabs site that allows you to easily switch between the two. (Search dejanews.com for "Improved Glide Switcher" to get my improved version that also switches Quake miniGL drivers.) Bottom Line: You made the right choice ("Yes") but will need to do some work to get your old Voodoo card working again. (2) The driver software allows only for RGB gamma numbers of -0.3~1.7 This range is too narrow and should go up at least to +3. Personally my green gamma should be +1.84. Can anyone suggest a solution? Check your Display/Properties dialog closely. The Raven has tabs in the middle that allow you to set properties for "Desktop", "Glide" and "D3D". Each tab provides slightly different capabilities. Specifically, the range of Gamma for the desktop is 0.30 to 1.70. But for Glide and D3D, the Gamma range is 0.30 to 2.30. If your green gamma needs to be above 1.7 on the desktop, I don't know how to do that. Mine is fine at 0.90. (3) The software driver does not let me define (or know) the refresh rate; only the resolution and color depths are set. My previous drivers let me define all aspects (gamma, resolution, refresh rates, color depth) even if it was against monitor's manufacturer's suggestion (I'd get a warning). Are there any drivers out there that let me have the same level of functionality (and I can use them with the Phonix card)? Be sure you are using the "Banshee" tab at the top of the Display/Properties dialog in addition to the "Settings" tab. Again, you should have the ability to set the refresh rate for both Glide and D3D. For the Raven, there is a "Refresh Rate" button that appears when Glide or D3D is selected. The refresh rate for the desktop is set on the "Adapter" page of the "Advanced Display Properites" dialog that is accessed from the "Settings" page of the Display/Properties dialog (phew!). (4) How "bad" is it if my refresh rate is faster than the recommended level? I've never seen a problem. I always select the fastest refresh rate that doesn't visually screw up my monitor's display. It's very obvious when that happens. (5) I have the option to disable Vsync. Why would I or not would I want to do this? Except for benchmarking issues (and that's a big controvercy), you should leave vsynch enabled. When it is off, you will see very annoying white flashes inside of 3D games. Hope this helps, Chip