Freyland Posted July 9, 2000 Share Posted July 9, 2000 Hi. I have decided, based on many hours of gamefreeze that the problem I am having is my video and audio cards sharing the same IRQ. It was mentioned in another thread using an undocumented feature of pstrip could allow you to tell the computer to devote more resources to the soundcard and less to the graphics card. I used the [latency] setup as described, but am unsure what latency to use. Using the insanely low number in the other threads example led to a blue-screen error (not my usual problem). I still have lock-ups on higher numbers, and I really do not know what number is too high (ie, when am I using more latency than what the video card was originally set at). I have a voodoo3 3000 and a Soundblaster live! x-gamer. Newest drivers for both. Thank you in advance. I religiously do not believe in swearing, and this lock-up problem as caused significant back-sliding. Jonathan 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted July 9, 2000 Share Posted July 9, 2000 If your sound card and your video card share the same IRQ you may need to do something else in order to fix your problem. Is your Voodoo 3 3000 an AGP card ? If it is then I'm not sure what modifying the PCI latency may do for you. Though AGP is a superset of the PCI bus, I believe it isn't managed in the same way. What you may need to do is physically change the PCI slot that your soundcard is in. If your Voodoo is an AGP card then quite often the PCI slot closest to the AGP slot will use the same IRQ. You will need to move the soundcard to another PCI slot. Often the last PCI slot will also share an IRQ with USB , while the first PCI slot will also often share an IRQ with on-board audio chip (an option that only so many motherboards offer). What you may need to do is check to see if there are any free IRQs in your system. Sometimes you can free some up by disabling serial/parallel/USB ports (if you don't need them) and allowing the PCI bus to use them. I believe doing this might help your problem. If your Voodoo 3 3000 is actually a PCI card then I would also suggest changing PCI slots around to see if you can get the soundcard and the video card on different IRQs (even if they have to share an IRQ, preferably a device that isn't used too often). Sometimes, if you're lucky, your motherboard will support assigning an IRQ to a specific PCI slot, but most boards don't have this feature in their CMOS/BIOS. If you like further help on this just let me know and I will see what I can offer. As for the latency value to use, this seems to be highly dependent on experimentation. I'm completely unfamiliar with what the values are for latency. Again a multiple of 8 is what the value has to be. As for swearing... When it comes to computers I've given into the dark side sometime ago... [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 07-09-2000).] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freyland Posted July 9, 2000 Author Share Posted July 9, 2000 Schrullenhaft, once again you have provided sound advice. I was not aware that the position of the PCI cards influenced their IRQ usage. I have been trying to force my AGP card to use one IRQ, and my soundcard to use IRQ 10, which is free. Hopefully, I will now bring down some Holy Smack on the problem. Will post results. Thank you Jonathan 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freyland Posted July 10, 2000 Author Share Posted July 10, 2000 Well, manually switching the sound card to a different pci slot did change IRQ's, and the sound and video cards no longer use the same one. However, the lock-ups continue. I closely examined powerstrip and noticed a "memory saver" of sorts, and I set that to 32 meg (windows 98 minimum for running). It looked like a memory leak may be the culprit for the following reasons: 1) Multiple times in past I have been playing and the screen graphics quickly and progressively become blocky, and lose definition. I have to restart CM. 2) After making the above changes, I loaded up a large mission with rain. I did not play the turn, but rather just sat there with the ambient sound and full weather graphics on. It never locked up, but I noticed the rain very subtly getting slower and slower. 3)Finally, powerstrip shows more and more consumption of memory when I play, and I have tried restoring in between turns. Seemed to help for a while, but it still locked up. Help! AMD k6-2 500mhz (no overclocking) voodoo3 3000 AGP card (no overclocking, now using 3/4 of video acceleration) Creative Labs Soundblaster Live! X-gamer (no hardware acceleration, again to maintain stability) 128 meg PCI ram directx 7.0a and allegedly the latest drivers. Genius Netpro mouse, although I allowed windows to install drivers, not my own (standard serial mouse) Jonathan 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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