Matrox Dual Head, Pulsar and Logic

John Cooper · Post by **John Cooper** » Tue Oct 30, 2001 9:06 am

hey folks,

anyone else experiencing pulsar graphics hanging probems, when using a matrox g400 or g450 dualhead, on win98se? i'm running two monitors, at 1280x1024, 16 bit color.
often, after using pulsar and LAP (and sometimes oasys) for awhile, the Pulsar graphics will "hang" - or stop painting correctly. so when i switch windows from LAP to Pulsar, the background is just stuck and won't update. all the sound is still working - it's just the graphics get stuck. only way to reset it is to reboot

i've also tried 1152 x 980, and i've tried the latest video drivers as well as some older drivers. i've tried turning down the "hardware acceleration" in the driver - no difference. i don't think it's the video card's fault, as i tried two different cards (400 and 450).

this problem was around in scope/sp too, but not in earlier pulsar versions.

could this be a windows problem i wonder? hmmm.

i'm hoping someone else has seen this kind of problem, and we can compare notes...

-john

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Tue Oct 30, 2001 10:46 am

First, Flash the Matrox BIOS, load the latest drivers. (Sounds like you may have done this already...)

How much RAM do you have? More RAM might mean longer periods of time until you start to see this...

Any background tasks running? For starters, don't have the Matrox Desktop icon load in your startup (Use Start, Run, MSCONFIG), while you are there, remove other stuff you don't need.

Turn Graphics Acceleration back up, that should be fine on an AGP card.

Try turning "Bus Mastering" Off however, through Display Properties, Advanced (you'll find it in there somewhere).

What version of DirectX are you using?

Hope that helps!

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Tue Oct 30, 2001 10:47 am

Finally "WinKey+D" (Desktop) or "WinKey+M" (Minimize) might allow the graphics to be redrawn once you click on Pulsar after minimizing it.

John Cooper · Post by **John Cooper** » Tue Oct 30, 2001 1:49 pm

On 2001-10-30 10:46, subhuman wrote:
First, Flash the Matrox BIOS, load the latest drivers. (Sounds like you may have done this already...)

i tried both the latest bios/driver, as well as a set from a year ago, to see if there's any difference. nope.

How much RAM do you have? More RAM might mean longer periods of time until you start to see this...

256mb, which should certainly be enough. ram is so cheap now, i should buy more just to have it - but i don't think that's related to the problem.

Any background tasks running? For starters, don't have the Matrox Desktop icon load in your startup (Use Start, Run, MSCONFIG), while you are there, remove other stuff you don't need.

yeah, that's all stripped down, pretty much.

Turn Graphics Acceleration back up, that should be fine on an AGP card.

yeah, once i determined that there was still the problem, even with it turned down, i turned it back up.

Try turning "Bus Mastering" Off however, through Display Properties, Advanced (you'll find it in there somewhere).

yep, tried that already too

on my other PC, with a matrox g450 running 1600x1200 at 24 bit color, my system would periodically hang, and turning off bus mastering fixed it.

What version of DirectX are you using?

hm, not sure. probably something quite old, but i don't think that anything directX is involved in scenario, is it?

thanks for all the suggestions sub! i've actually just heard from sander that he's having similar problems with a dualhead matrox g400, so maybe there's a real bug somewhere.

anyone else experiencing this kind of problem?

piker · Post by **piker** » Tue Oct 30, 2001 3:15 pm

i have the same problem with a g450 using only a single display - the graphics will sometimes just sit there for about a few seconds before refreshing as if you were waiting for a web page to load up.
maybe someone could hound Matrox directly explaining that the card is being use dfor audio production and that we dont need all the extra rendering capabilities only stability etc.

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Tue Oct 30, 2001 3:22 pm

Anything on the same IRQ as your Matrox?

piker · Post by **piker** » Tue Oct 30, 2001 4:57 pm

ahh - the Matrox is sharing IRQ 9 with my SCSI card but this is on my ofice harddrive - i'll check the 'audio' production drive later and see if it is sharing as well.

LHong · Post by **LHong** » Tue Oct 30, 2001 5:49 pm

I think more memory will help. One more thing is that the pulsar/scope requires large amount of Vcache in background apps, make sure the Vcache is set to about 25% of the total installed-RAM.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: LHong on 2001-10-30 17:50 ]</font>

Marc de Ruiter · Post by **Marc de Ruiter** » Mon Nov 05, 2001 4:48 am

Try to enlarge the (AGP)aperturesize in the motherboard BIOS. It´s the size of the memory the AGP chipset can address without involvement of the CPU.I found out higher values increase performance and stability for my system at least).

Hope this helps,

Marc

at0m · Post by **at0m** » Mon Nov 05, 2001 11:22 pm

On 2001-10-30 09:06, John Cooper wrote:
...
the Pulsar graphics will "hang" - or stop painting correctly. so when i switch windows from LAP to Pulsar, the background is just stuck and won't update. all the sound is still working - it's just the graphics get stuck. only way to reset it is to reboot
...
-john

Somebody told me he was recording a session on another computer via ADAT, controlling Pulsar via midi when he had a blue screen. The Pulsar kept running flawlessly till he shut-down his pc, he was actually able to continue his recordings

prart · Post by **prart** » Tue Nov 06, 2001 2:36 am

I used same w/you stuff but nothing happen,i's alway fine.