CompuServe Messages

Mike, >> Were you referring to your 486 bios or Plato bios? << Pretty much you can enable/disable shadowing on the Plato, and that's about it, everything else is pretty much automatic. I haven't been able to get any speed increase for the Stealth or Viper in 3DS. On my 486's which are now gone, I could play around with wait states, shadowing and cacheing etc. and I got some pretty terrific results. I shaved almost 25 seconds off the default setup on a 640×480 rendering. I was also able to dramatically speed up re-draws in 3DS as a result. The AMI -08 Bios has some flexibility left but ver -10 on the P90 is like an automatic Corvette. <g> I've heard there are problems with the -08 version when using SCSI, but can't confirm it. I'm using a DTC PCI SCSI with an NCR 810 controller with no problems; one on an -08 and one on a -10. The rest are IDE per Intel. My pet peeve is that they put the automatic transmission (flash bios) right in the middle of frame E_ which I could just as well do without. The point being you could down grade your flash bios to ver -08 and might realise a minimal performance increase. I mentioned the ATI being optimized for Windows which has more to do with the chipset which is customized for the Windows environment, though in some cases on the 486 at least you can get a performance increase in 3DS by adjusting system bios as I outlined. It really depends on the motherboard and the video card, some boards won't give you much, if any flexibility and can become unstable if pushed. John