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ATI and fast write.

H

HippieCat

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 2, 2004
Messages
133
So my question is this...

If "almost" everyone has to turn off fast write on their ATI cards why does ATI even bother giving us the option?

Has anyone even gotten fast wite to work without artifacting or crashing? If so, what were the circumstances? What makes fastwite work? Is it having better memory on the card or m/b, vendor specific problems, or what?

[edit]
toss in the "almost" ;)
 
I've got fast writes enabled on my Radeon 8500, and I haven't had any problems with it.
 
If "almost" everyone has to turn off fast write on their ATI cards why does ATI even bother giving us the option?
Click to expand...
Fast writes actually work fine for most people. Whenever you install a new set of drivers, SmartGART does some tests to see if fast writes are reliable and to find the maximum safe AGP speed. For most machines, that's fast writes on and AGP at maximum speed. Unfortunately, those tests are too short to catch intermittant problems or ones that happen only after the components heat up after being loaded for a while. If you're having any kind of problems, it's just a good idea to try to turn fast writes off and slow down your AGP speed to see if it solves the problem because it's easy and often works. They added fast writes in AGP 2.0 so that the CPU could talk directly to the GPU without writing to motherboard RAM. That helps speed some operations up so having fast writes enabled is a good thing if they are reliable. But if you can't enable them, there's no reason to get bent out of shape. They don't really speed most things up that much. The same is true for AGP 8X.

The reason that full speed AGP and fast writes tend to be flakey sometimes is basically because they are transfering data like a bat-outta-hell. They are transfering data on a 66MHz clock, octuple pumped, 32 bits wide, using a non-differential 0.8V swing, usually over a four layer board (if you don't know hardware then just think "Be Afraid. BE VERY AFRAID!"). Basically, that's pushing the envelope, electronically speaking, if you're talking about low-budget consumer hardware where they're trying to shave every nickel off of their bill of materials. If you've ever seen high-speed scope traces of that data, it ain't exactly perfect ones and zeroes. If you're board is laid out and decoupled properly, and the CPU, northbridge, and GPU are all nice and cool, and the power supply is keeping the rails relatively smooth, then it probably works just fine. But if anything one of those links in the chain is a little weak, then you've got problems.
 
It's worked fine with zero issues on every card I've ever owned. ATI and Nvidia.
 
Fast writes works fine for my ATI 9600Pro. I did have to move the AGP speed down to 4x though...but I think that is because of my motherboard. I see no difference between AGP 8x and 4x.

Lyquist
 
Mister E said:
It's worked fine with zero issues on every card I've ever owned. ATI and Nvidia.
Click to expand...
Same here, but the first ATI AGP card I had was the 8500. I don't believe the Radeon 7500 even supported FW anyways.

UncleMacro said:
The reason that full speed AGP and fast writes tend to be flakey sometimes is basically because they are transfering data like a bat-outta-hell.
Click to expand...
IMO, it's flaky because some chipset makers can't follow the spec (or have a buggy AGP GART). Intel and nvidia chipsets don't have problems making FW work right.
 
My 9700p on my Asus P4G8X motherboard (E7205 chipset), would crash to 16-colour, 640x480 every so often. This is a known issue, that has affected lots of people. Turning off Fastwrites magically solved this for me though, so I guess that's why fastwrites has such a bad reputation.

Oddly enough, my 6800GT works perfectly with fastwrites.
 
Hmmm, I guess I have been reading to many articles and forum threads where people have to turn off fast write. I have only had one card with fast write and it's my Sapphire 9800pro. I could see how maybe Sapphire would install lower end parts to maybe make fast writes not work reliably just to pump out a cheaper card.

Really the only problem I have with it is that it displays vertical lines on my windows boot screen and desktop, with some artifacting while in 3d.
 
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