[AG-TECH] Video boards...

[Marty Hoag]

   We used to have the intermittent boot failures on our display 
machine with Intel OR840 motherboard, G400 dual AGP and G200 quad PCI 
(the drivers were from a year ago).  It seemed to happen when the 
system should be switching from the boot display (one of the AGP 
VGA outputs) to the console (on G200).  The Intel motherboard 
didn't allow a change in the boot display that we cound find.

   But since I upgraded the system for AGiB to W2K plus SP2, installed 
new unified drivers, AND upgraded the BIOS of the MATROX cards I 
haven't seen this hang! 

   The only downside of this is that now the video (ddvic) performance
seems to be much worse when we get something over 40 video streams
displayed (e.g. autoplaced in small sizes, especially if they include
the PCI portion of the screen - we have 2 projectors on the AGP and
one on the PCI where we usually just put dppt and such).

   I think Russ Wolf mentioned that he had some problems with unified
drivers with another matrox card so I thought I might try backing off
the drivers to ones specific for the cards.  But I haven't had any
time to try stuff and wondered if anyone else following this thread
had run into performance issues with the current Matrox drivers or
SP2 (the old system had base W2K without any SP).  I think I opened
a bug report on this.  One symptom of the windows displays being under
duress seems to be that the loss rates on the ddvic thumbnail page
seem to start to increase as things slow down (I am thinking that is
a side effect of resource constraints though rather than cause).

   Marty