(If you are not using a PC with a PCI VGA accelerator card, you need not read any further....) WARNING: Long post ahead! updated 8/2/98 In the past this information has been suppressed, now it can be told... A good number of VGA card manufacturers are squeezing out a few extra points on their winbench scores by locking up the PCI bus. This is fine for graphics and most systems on the PC (hard disks and such) don't even notice the problem.... Unfortunately this can hurt the audio system in a big way. Most audio cards use ISA/DMA to trickle samples over the bus one word at a time. Even PCI cards such as the AMIII can be hurt by this problem because they trickle the data over the bus in tiny PCI transfers. When another device illegally locks up the bus for more than 1/88200th of a second, there's a good chance you will lose audio samples resulting an a glitch in the recording or playback. How do you know if you're having this problem? Try opening up your favorite wave editing program, loading a wave file and hitting the play button. While the audio is playing, grab the top of the window (assuming it is not maximized) and repeatedly pick it up and drag it to another location on the desktop. On a soundblaster compatible card, the audio will glitch and pop while you drag the window. On a ZA2 card, there is a 50/50 chance the audio will swap L/R channels after such a glitch. On an adb card, not only can the right and left channels swap, but there is also a good chance the audio will be left in a glitchy mode that makes the audio repeatedly jump channels resulting in a high pitch scratchy noise. At this point in the discussion, I would like to stress that this is NOT (I repeat NOT) the fault of the soundcard! This is not even the fault of the VGA card... it is in fact the fault of the VGA driver. If you do not experience any glitching or distortion then you can probably ignore the rest of this post! I've heard that the VGA drivers supplied by Microsoft (verses the drivers supplied by the VGA manufacturer) do not suffer from this problem. I think Matrox was the first to play with this, but it doesn't really matter because most high performance VGA accelerator cards for the PCI bus are doing the same thing now. When a number of graphics acceleration operations need to be performed, these commands are sent from the VGA driver to the VGA card over the PCI bus. The VGA chipset has a built in queue that is capable of holding several accelerator commands. Normally the driver checks a status bit on the VGA card to tell if this queue is full or not. If the queue is full, the driver waits for the queue to have a free space before sending the next command. Matrox discovered (and everyone soon followed) that you could increase VGA performance by NOT CHECKING THIS STATUS BIT!!!!! What happens when you write blindly to a full queue of commands on the VGA card? The bus hangs... The bus master has started a PCI transaction, but the target (the VGA card) can't accept the data yet because it has no place to put it. As soon as the VGA card has room for the data, then the transaction can complete... but until that time the PCI bus is completely locked up. No PCI or ISA transactions can happen. This can take a long time (40 or more audio cycles) if the current VGA operation is a huge BITBLT on a 24bit screen... A 256 or 512 bit FIFO just ain't gonna cut it. The only acceptable solution to this problem is to put the queue check BACK into the VGA driver. I have been discussing this problem with some of the engineers at Matrox and Tseng labs and have some solutions for you! Tseng labs has released a new version of their ET6000 VGA driver that behaves nicer to the PCI bus.. this driver is now trickling down to the STB and Hercules products that use the ET6000 chip. For the Hercules Dynamite 128 card, there is a new driver on the Hercules BBS (not web page... don't ask me) called DV95112 (Version 1.12) Using this driver, you need to add a special switch in your system.ini file. Under the heading [Hercules] there is a line that reads "Optimization=0" you will need to set this to "Optimization=1"... ta da, problem fixed. It turns out that Matrox has ALWAYS had a hidden back door switch to enable this check in the VGA driver. If you are using the Matrox Millennium, you will need to add the following lines to your system.ini file: [mga.drv] PCIChipset=1 This almost fixes the problem completely.... you will also need to disable the "Use PowerGDI acceleration" feature in the Advanced Matrox setup (Control Panel->Display Properties->MGA Settings->Advanced->Performance) ta da... problem fixed. [update August 1998] It seems that the generic Trident cards 9685/9682/9680/9440 do NOT suffer any problems using the standard Microsoft Win98 drivers. [update July 1997] I've heard from the good folks at S3 that ->ALL<- S3 drivers for all of their VGA cards (downloaded from www.s3.com) can be fixed by adding a line in system.ini under the [display] section... After [display] add the line 'bus-throttle=1' so (for S3 drivers): [display] busthrottle=1 It seems that this fix also works with the latest Microsoft Win98 drivers for S3 cards. If your Win98 system.ini file doesn't have a [display] section, you can add it at the end of the file. [update 2/11/98] For owners of newer Matrox cards: Go get the latest Matrox drivers from www.matrox.com.. (V3.80 drivers) Go to screen properties (right click in main window) Go to setting tab, Click on PowerDesk button On V3.80 there is no longer a 'PCI Bus retries' option. Uncheck 'Use Bus Mastering' (off) .. at least this worked for me On Pentium Pro machines, Uncheck 'Use Write-Combining' Click on OK [updated November 1997] For owners of the #9 Imagine 128 series 2 It seems a new driver (version 4.102.36) is now available directly from the folks at #9 upon request.. Unfortunately there are other VGA maker who have not acknowledged this problem (not that Matrox or Tseng has formally done so either). And we as users, software manufacturers or hardware manufacturers need to get the word out that this is a VGA problem and not a DMA problem!!!!!! We need to drill it through the heads of the VGA card makers that they can't get away with this B.S. without at least having an OPTION to make the driver behave appropriately. Have you ever been told to turn the VGA acceleration off??? or to reduce the size of your VGA screen??? or reduce the color depth??? THESE ARE NOT ACCEPTABLE SOLUTIONS!!! Call your VGA manufacturer and tell them they need to fix the problem! (You will probably need to get beyond Joe Tech Support, because he probably doesn't know anything about this... please inform him!) This message has been brought to you by Greg Hanssen copyright 1996 Zefiro Acoustics. PLEASE feel free to post this to any forum where the knowledge can be used.