C CarsonThe P_Pro proccesor was really designed for server duty and the chip is not set up to write to video at all fast ( the P II has the same problem ... Intel hasn't fixed this ... strange{what I mean is ; How will this profit Intel ?} ). THIS CAN BE FIXED...hence this page !
John Hinkley creator of Fastvid_90.5K has managed to overcome the shortcomings of the P_Pro's write to both the Linear Frame-Buffer and Banked VGA memory . This fixes things pretty good , as you can see below it's much faster on my machine . The results are with the proccesor at 233mhz and the S3 video proccesor at 66mhz .
Before:
- DRAM to banked VGA = 16.22 meg/sec
- DRAM to linear framebuffer = 29.49 meg/sec
After:
- DRAM to banked VGA = 77.41 meg/sec
- DRAM to linear framebuffer = 90.32 meg/sec
This is great but because Fastvid has to write instructions to "ring 0" it can only do its work in real mode DOS so DOS Quake runs great , but what about NT and other OSs ?
I'm not sure who came up with Boothd_9.46K but it is a slick bit of hackage . Running boothd from an unencumbered DOS prompt or a "system disc" will enable Fastvid and other stuff too ... then it will return you to your boot start or boot selector and allow you to boot with the P_Pro enabled ... way cool .
This here_320k is a copy of what I use in my machine ; it will only work , as configured , with video cards that use an S3 chip and have 8meg of video RAM at F4000000 ; very few systems will run it "raw", so change it already ... read readme.txt.
From my boot selector (multiboot created by NT4.0 installation) I boot to DOS then a multiboot selector I made in DOS boots Linux with fastvid etc. enabled (the default of course), boots DOS enabling Fastvid etc. or enables Fastvid etc. and returns me to the NT multiboot menu ... amaze your friends ... its not that hard ;-) . You can adapt the "This here" CCboot.zip to do this .
Copyright © 1998 C Carson