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Nvidia XGL980 Card -- Any tweaking suggestions?

18 REPLIES 18
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Message 1 of 19
barrett_steele
174 Views, 18 Replies

Nvidia XGL980 Card -- Any tweaking suggestions?

Hi All!

My company just invested in two new CAD machines for running Inventor6. Specifically, they're P4's with 1 GB RAM, and the nvidia XGL980 graphics card from PNY. They're both running WinXP Pro, also.

Basically, I was wondering if anyone out there had any settings or tweaks that you would recommend for the card. We haven't really started using them yet, so we haven't had the chance to run into problems... yet. But, I was hoping to do some 'preventive maintainance' and go ahead and get the cards and I6 set up to the optimal conditions.

I imagine that any specific settings used for the XGL900 card would apply to this card as well. So anyone with experience with the 900 please post here.

Thanks so much for your help,
Barrett
18 REPLIES 18
Message 2 of 19
MechMan_
in reply to: barrett_steele

LOL, you've got one of the best cards on the market and you're already looking to tweak it? You're a tough guy to please aren't you. B-)

MechMan
Message 3 of 19
Anonymous
in reply to: barrett_steele

I have a 900.  I am using the latest NVIDIA
drivers and that's it.  I can't seem to make the card blink...


--
Sean Dotson, PE

href="http://www.sdotson.com">http://www.sdotson.com

Check the Inventor
FAQ for most common questions

href="http://www.sdotson.com/faq.html">www.sdotson.com/faq.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
Hi
All!

My company just invested in two new CAD machines for running Inventor6.
Specifically, they're P4's with 1 GB RAM, and the nvidia XGL980 graphics card
from PNY. They're both running WinXP Pro, also.

Basically, I was wondering if anyone out there had any settings or tweaks
that you would recommend for the card. We haven't really started using them
yet, so we haven't had the chance to run into problems... yet. But, I was
hoping to do some 'preventive maintainance' and go ahead and get the cards and
I6 set up to the optimal conditions.

I imagine that any specific settings used for the XGL900 card would apply
to this card as well. So anyone with experience with the 900 please post here.

Thanks so much for your help,
Barrett

Message 4 of 19
Anonymous
in reply to: barrett_steele

I have the 900 XGL.  The only change I made
was to turn off the capping options.  It's a tweak Sean posted for lesser
nVida cards.  I like the visual from the tweak so I use it on all the
nVidia cards now.


--
Hal Gwin
Mechanical
Designer
Xenogen
--
Dell 650
Dual 2.66GHz Xeon
1.5GB DDR
RAM
Quadro4 900XGL
nVidia 6.13.10.4072 Drivers
Message 5 of 19
Anonymous
in reply to: barrett_steele

That post is subject "sliced view in part mode?",
see Sean's reply dated Jan 15, 2003.

 
Message 6 of 19
Anonymous
in reply to: barrett_steele

Oh well, yeah, I do use that one.  I guess
that is considered a tweak hunh..?


--
Sean Dotson, PE

href="http://www.sdotson.com">http://www.sdotson.com

Check the Inventor
FAQ for most common questions

href="http://www.sdotson.com/faq.html">www.sdotson.com/faq.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">

I have the 900 XGL.  The only change I made
was to turn off the capping options.  It's a tweak Sean posted for lesser
nVida cards.  I like the visual from the tweak so I use it on all the
nVidia cards now.


--
Hal Gwin
Mechanical
Designer
Xenogen
--
Dell 650
Dual 2.66GHz Xeon
1.5GB DDR
RAM
Quadro4 900XGL
nVidia 6.13.10.4072
Drivers
Message 7 of 19
Anonymous
in reply to: barrett_steele

Just curious Sean.  What driver are you
running on your Toshiba?  I'm working with 6.13.10.3110. 
Message 8 of 19
Anonymous
in reply to: barrett_steele

10.2846 guess it's time for me to update
hunh?  Still stable with this new driver?


--
Sean Dotson, PE

href="http://www.sdotson.com">http://www.sdotson.com

Check the Inventor
FAQ for most common questions

href="http://www.sdotson.com/faq.html">www.sdotson.com/faq.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">

Just curious Sean.  What driver are you
running on your Toshiba?  I'm working with 6.13.10.3110. 
Message 9 of 19
Anonymous
in reply to: barrett_steele

oh yea.  sweet.  Will the generic Nvidia
drivers work on these chips?
Message 10 of 19
Anonymous
in reply to: barrett_steele

Default settings apart from the OpenGL tab in advanced options under Windows Display settings. Uncheck the Unified
Back/Depth buffer, check the Maximize Texture memory option. Won't notice much difference until you start working on
massive assemblies.

In the Registry (be careful in the registry, you can make your machine unstable)

HKCU\Software\Autodesk\Inventor\RegistryVersion6.0\System\Preferences\Display

Change Min Full LOD Frame Rate from 10 to 7. This just smooths out the change in graphics display, only really
noticeable again on very large assemblies.

John Bilton
Message 11 of 19
Anonymous
in reply to: barrett_steele

Hey, I lucked up and picked up a 980 off of Ebay for 400. Used for test
only, or so they say. I will be putting it in my new system which I will be
building up this weekend. I can hardly wait.

New system:
Asus A7n8x
AMD XP 2.6 @333fsb
1.5gig pc3200 DDram
Ata133 Raid
PNY 980 XGL VC
Win XP Pro


"John Bilton" wrote in message
news:167259F6B58C676A9153C7083DBB0A40@in.WebX.maYIadrTaRb...
> Default settings apart from the OpenGL tab in advanced options under
Windows Display settings. Uncheck the Unified
> Back/Depth buffer, check the Maximize Texture memory option. Won't notice
much difference until you start working on
> massive assemblies.
>
> In the Registry (be careful in the registry, you can make your machine
unstable)
>
>
HKCU\Software\Autodesk\Inventor\RegistryVersion6.0\System\Preferences\Displa
y
>
> Change Min Full LOD Frame Rate from 10 to 7. This just smooths out the
change in graphics display, only really
> noticeable again on very large assemblies.
>
> John Bilton
>
Message 12 of 19
Anonymous
in reply to: barrett_steele

Not sure..I get the drivers from the Toshiba
website.  They are usually only a day or so behind NVIDIA.


--
Sean Dotson, PE

href="http://www.sdotson.com">http://www.sdotson.com

Check the Inventor
FAQ for most common questions

href="http://www.sdotson.com/faq.html">www.sdotson.com/faq.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">

oh yea.  sweet.  Will the generic
Nvidia drivers work on these chips?
Message 13 of 19
Anonymous
in reply to: barrett_steele

Just check your BIOS on motherboard, and don't forget to increase your AGP paerture to 128MB in BIOS, oh and you could
enable fast writes as well if you don't run any legacy apps.

Have fun

John Bilton
Message 14 of 19

I'm sorry, Hal... I'm a bit of a newbie...

capping options? wha?....

thanks,
b.
Message 15 of 19

Hi All!

Well, alrighty... I changed the AGP aperture size in BIOS to 128 megs, and I checked/unchecked the suggested settings in the nvidia settings within Windows. I ran 3DMark 2002 SE to compare the video system to when the machine was 'brand new' (which was just last week). The score actually went down -- 9,155 as compared to 11,910 previously.

So, here's another, slightly-related question for you: Is there some sort of video benchmarking tool that CAD users typically use? I know that there are CAD cards, and then there are 'gaming' cards (such as nvidia's GeForce line). Nvidia actually told me one time that the game cards would run a game better than my XGL980 card would -- I'm assuming because the architectures are designed to handle certain types of operations that are more specific to either games or CAD. So, recognizing that 3DMark benchmarks a video system by playing back 'game movies', I'm wondering if it's actually a good measure of what my CAD card can do?

Also, is it possible that even though my card scored a lower score after changing those settings, that it would actually run I6 better?

Your thoughts?

Thanks!
b.
Message 16 of 19
Anonymous
in reply to: barrett_steele

look for this msg:

 

Subject: Anyone Benchmarking with Specview
7.0?
Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2003 10:35:12 -0800

 

thats a cad-specific benchmark
program.

 

 

Matt
Message 17 of 19
Anonymous
in reply to: barrett_steele

Matt's hit the nail on the head - CAD specific benchmarking. I know a lot of benchmark utilites that say a Wildcat VP
is faster than a Quadro4, but when using Inventor the opposite is true. The suggestions I made are purely for Inventor
and only make a difference on big models - you can reset them back to default.

John Bilton
Message 18 of 19

Oh, and I have one other question for you guys who are so willing (thank goodness!) to share your experience with a newbie:

There's a setting in the BIOS that says "Video RAM cacheable". Do I want to enable that?

Thanks,
barrett
Message 19 of 19

Hi all!

Okay, I'll post this in the specviewperf thread as well, but I just ran it on my machine, and here are the results:

February 13, 2003
Machine: A018

SpecViewPerf 7.0 benchmark

Pentium 4, 2.53GHz, 1GB DDR2100 Ram
Soyo DragonLite Mobo
WD 80GB 7200RPM HDD
PNY Quadro4 XGL980 Video card (128MB, 8x AGP)
-- AGP aperture set at 128 MB
WinXP Pro



Run All Summary

---------- SUM_RESULTS\3DSMAX\SUMMARY.TXT
3dsmax-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 13.65

---------- SUM_RESULTS\DRV\SUMMARY.TXT
drv-08 Weighted Geometric Mean = 37.02

---------- SUM_RESULTS\DX\SUMMARY.TXT
dx-07 Weighted Geometric Mean = 66.24

---------- SUM_RESULTS\LIGHT\SUMMARY.TXT
light-05 Weighted Geometric Mean = 16.94

---------- SUM_RESULTS\PROE\SUMMARY.TXT
proe-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 10.87

---------- SUM_RESULTS\UGS\SUMMARY.TXT
ugs-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 16.04



Thanks!
barrett

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