How to unlock Pipelines and Vertex Shader on a 6800 (nu/le/gs)

[2Xtreme21]

Yup that's great. Nice scores.

Also, the CPU tests, with today's CPU's are going to suck, especially with a P4 and in my case an AXP.

 

[mkbt]

Would it be worth the effort to perform additional modding? 2D: 300/875 - 3D: 350/875. after this artifacts, bad scores etc.

 

[2Xtreme21]

I wouldn't bother, honestly. For an extra few MHz you're risking your entire investment.

 

[mkbt]

Thought so - also pretty satisfied with the results - 6800GT performance for half the price! And also happy not having to solder....thank you 2Xtreme21 for your guidance and help!

 

[cmitchell17]

When i went to the finale menu where you had to check the 2 things they where both checked but the under the HW masked thing there was nothing.

 

[Rock Hydra]

Well, I'm going to test this out on my eVGA 6800. I hope it works.

 

[Rock Hydra]

Everything good so far. Going to test some 3D apps right now to see what happens.

 

[pf100]

About "hitching"

I was able to unlock my brand new $189 6800nu (following this guide) to 16x5x1, 365/910, and is stable after a few weeks of throwing everything at it that I can. The last vertex unit caused massive graphics corruption if unlocked so it'll remain forever locked, plus I hear that the extra vertex unit makes the least amount of difference overall anyway. With the core clocked at 375 the computer locked up after about 20 minutes of gaming, and I found 365mhz to work fine for hours at a time. The card seemed to work fine with the ram at 950 except in the Pariah demo where I got vertical lines in some parts of the game. I tried different drivers but that wasn't the problem. Even Doom 3 and Far Cry worked fine at 950. But since I want stability I'm leaving it at 910 (believe me, I'm not complaining).
My previous video card was an ATI 9700 pro with a cpu heatsink rigged onto it and overclocked which got a 3dmark05 score of 2327. My 3dmark05 score with the 6800nu, before unlocking and overclocking, was 3862. After unlocking and overclocking I got 4285. Not bad.

Now that I had a modded 6800nu, I was able to play most games at 1600x1200 and some at 1800x1440, which introduced another problem - "hitching." I noticed that occasionally the game would stop for a split second to apparently swap memory. It happens so fast it looks like the game "jerks." And I noticed my hard drive light usually "blipped" when that happened. This seemed to rarely, if ever, happen when playing a game at 1152x864 or 1280xsomething. But I refuse to play games with my 6800 at such low resolutions when I can avoid it. So I decided to speed up my hard drive access time since I already had 2 identical 30gb maxtor 7200 hard drives and a generic sil0680 ata/133 pci raid pata controller. So I set them up in a striped raid 0 array. I partitioned and formatted to ntfs like this: a 6gb windows partition, a 50gb games partition, and a 1.5gb swapfile partition (I had to do the nolowdiskspacechecks registry tweak to keep xp from reminding me the swapfile was taking up the entire swap partition and there was no disk space left). I disabled the indexing service, disabled system restore on the swapfile and games partition, and set the recycle bin not to monitor the games or swapfile partitions.

Now, not only does xp load faster, but the hitching problem was greatly reduced. Yes, it still does it, but it's not annoying like it used to be.

I wonder if more ram would help. I run a bare minimum of junk in the system tray and keep an eye on what's running and how much ram it's using. Is 1gb not enough anymore? In windows task manager under the performance tab, after playing games for a while, my peak commit charge is (right now) 936,220, which leaves about 88mb which seems like I may be running out of ram. I suppose it would make sense that high resolutions with all or near all game settings on high or very high would use more ram.

 

[Rock Hydra]

I've been able to play FarCry for at least 15 minutes with no problem, although it seems I've taken something of a performance hit.

 

[cmitchell17]

THe two things that you said to check that where masked are already enabled what do i do.

 

[2Xtreme21]

bf100 great post. To start I would raise your AGP Aperature size. It sounds like it may be trying to access more onboard video RAM than is actually there, which very well could happen. Raising the aperature size should "lend" some of your system ram to do the job of VRAM. 1gb is plenty for today's gaming, so that should be no problem. Also, you said you formatted your hard drive? If not, you may just want to "defrag" your pagefile simply by setting "No Page File" and then restarting your computer. Then just set it back to 1.5gb and restart again. That greatly increases my performance when I do it on a monthly or so basis.

Also, do you have that good of an OC with just stock cooling? That's amazing, though for some reason I'd expect your 3dmark05 scores to be higher. Mine (with OC) comes to about 4300, though I am using XG drivers which GREATLY increase performance without sacrificing IQ.

Rock Hydra try some other drivers.

cmitchell17 then your card came with 16 pipes and 6 shaders unlocked or you're trying to softmod a PCI-express 6800 (which has nothing to softmod).

 

[thecoolnessrune]

STICKY!!!!!!!

 

[cmitchell17]

i dont have a pci express. My card is a EVGA e Geforce 6800 128DDR

 

[2Xtreme21]

Please, if you could, post a screenshot of where everything is checked and then your main menu screen.

 

[pf100]

bf100 great post. To start I would raise your AGP Aperature size. It sounds like it may be trying to access more onboard video RAM than is actually there, which very well could happen. Raising the aperature size should "lend" some of your system ram to do the job of VRAM. 1gb is plenty for today's gaming, so that should be no problem. Also, you said you formatted your hard drive? If not, you may just want to "defrag" your pagefile simply by setting "No Page File" and then restarting your computer. Then just set it back to 1.5gb and restart again. That greatly increases my performance when I do it on a monthly or so basis.

Also, do you have that good of an OC with just stock cooling? That's amazing, though for some reason I'd expect your 3dmark05 scores to be higher. Mine (with OC) comes to about 4300, though I am using XG drivers which GREATLY increase performance without sacrificing IQ.

Hi, 2Xtreme21. Good call about the AGP aperture size. I forgot to mention in my original post that I have it set to 256mb which helped the hitching problem more than 64 or 128. 512mb seemed to make it worse. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I read somewhere that you have roughly half of your aperture size setting available as video ram, so by setting it to 256mb I'd get another 128mb to add to my 6800's existing 128mb for a total of 256mb usable graphics ram. And yes, I did a format and clean os install, and I'm assuming that since the swapfile is the full size of the partition that it can't get fragmented.

My overclock is with stock cooling, sort of. As you may already know, the Leadtek 6800 has a big fat one pound copper heat sink. Plus, I have a 120mm fan mounted in the side of my case blowing directly onto the video card which I originally put there to cool the previously insanely hot-running 9700 pro. I have the fan running on 5 volts instead of 12 volts to keep it from sounding like a vacuum cleaner. And as for the clock speeds, I was sort of expecting to get somewhere around the core clock speed I got, but I was amazed at the speed the ram clocked to. I don't know why it clocked so high, but I haven't removed the heatsink to look at the ram either, so I have no idea what it is. If you can point me in the right direction on how to remove the heatsink I'll do it and post what kind of ram it has if you think it might help someone here.

I'll install the XG drivers immediately and re-benchmark by tomorrow and post the results. Thanks.

 

[cmitchell17]

Sorry but i dont know who to post a screen shot ill try though.

 

[2Xtreme21]

Thank you very much for posting your findings, pf100. You mentioned earlier that your hard drive was undergoing access during these "hitches"? That's really odd as it seems you've taken every step to insure that things wouldn't conflict with eachother when it comes to accessing. If you're up for a little lengthy debugging session, try getting rid of your page file partition and simply running two clean disks with only, say 3dmark05 or whichever program is the most prone to "hitch", installed. Put a page file with min size as 1024mb and max as (1024 + 2048/2 sorry no calculator handy) on both drives (assuming you're leaving one [C:] for the OS and its subsidiaries and [D:] for storage / applications) and begin your testing. Then try dropping down to no page file at all on either of the drives. The least this can do is semi-rule out the hard drive in your hitching problem, though I'm almost positive it, specifically the page file, is the culprit.

Edit: cmitchell, hit print screen, go into paint, hit edit > paste. Then save it as a jpg image and upload it to a server. Then simply link to it.

 

[pf100]

A few things:

First, I installed the XG driver v77.62 using these instructions:
http://www.aoaforums.com/forum/showthread.php?t=31513

My previous 3dmark05 score before I did a clean os install was 4285 with the v71.89 nvidia driver, and now with the XG v77.62 driver I get 4407, plus I had my processor running 100mhz faster (now at 2300mhz) with this last test, so in all fairness all things were not equal. Still, I have no doubt the XG driver helped a lot. I seem to be getting close to 6800GT benchmark scores now. I'd like to try to shoot for a 5000 score, but I'd probably have to bump up the graphics core voltage by editing and reflashing my bios and I don't know if it would be worth the risk. Rivatuner says my core voltage is 2.2 volts. Maybe if it was 2.4v I could get around a 400mhz core clock. Is there a soft mod that'll do that?

Second, your comment about the pagefile being the culprit got me to try turning off the pagefile. I did and there's no difference in the hitching. Remember when I said that when I did a format and reinstall of xp on the striped drive setup that the hitching problem improved? Now it seems that it may have completely eliminated drive access being a factor. So I played a few games a while ago and noticed that now when it jerks it's not reading the drive anymore, it's when I fire a weapon and the muzzle flash makes the game pause momentarily. Specifically Far Cry. So I played around with the cl_weapon_light setting in the far cry lighting config and set it to 0 so that the muzzle flash doesn't use dynamic lighting. That seems to have fixed that problem.
What I'm wondering is, does dynamic lighting really need the extra vertex unit to keep up with the rest of the card? Or am I just playing the game with the settings a bit too high for a 128mb video card? Hmmm...

 

[cmitchell17]

Here are three pics:

http://img91.echo.cx/img91/4996/rivatunerpic18mu.png

http://img91.echo.cx/img91/2477/rivatunerpic23ko.png

http://img91.echo.cx/img91/3081/rivatunerpic39sm.png

 

[2Xtreme21]

cmitchell, you need to Install it dude. Follow my instructions step by step and you'll get it.

pf100, dynamic lighting could very well cause it. Does it seem to happen only when it (dynamic lighting) is being used? The extra vertex processor should play an extremely minimal role in performance and it'd be stupid for Far Cry or any other game to require a card with exactly 6 shaders to be able to play. Try messing with the details. You said when you turn the lighting off, it seems to fix it. It could just very well be the detail level needs to be dropped down a bit to be able to play it, though I don't see why. Let me try running some tests on other games you say are causing the said hitching. I don't have Far Cry, but I have Doom 3 and HL2, so if either of them cause it at a certain part, let me know and I'll try testing it.

 

[Kogan]

I've got a leadtek 6800 and have unlocked the extra pipes and shader. No graphics corruption or problems, but 3d performance is slower by about 5%. If I re-lock the pipes, performance goes back to normal. The shader seems to have no affect at at all.

Does this mean I've got bad pipes, or is something else wrong? I'm using the newest nvidia drivers that were released yesterday. Should I try different drivers?

 

[2Xtreme21]

I'd try another driver, Kogan. These new ones really aren't that great when it comes to performace or IQ. They're merely there to introduce the 7800 series, I think.

http://www.tweaksrus.com Try the 77.62 Type 2's.

 

[pf100]

pf100, dynamic lighting could very well cause it. Does it seem to happen only when it (dynamic lighting) is being used? The extra vertex processor should play an extremely minimal role in performance and it'd be stupid for Far Cry or any other game to require a card with exactly 6 shaders to be able to play. Try messing with the details. You said when you turn the lighting off, it seems to fix it. It could just very well be the detail level needs to be dropped down a bit to be able to play it, though I don't see why. Let me try running some tests on other games you say are causing the said hitching. I don't have Far Cry, but I have Doom 3 and HL2, so if either of them cause it at a certain part, let me know and I'll try testing it.

I've got one for you 2Xtreme21. Fire up Half Life 2 and start a new game on the water hazard level 4. You'll start out standing next to your airboat. Take off and you'll go over a ledge, then you'll have to crash through the exit of the drainage pipe you're in through two boards in the way. At the precise moment you crash through the boards, the game stops for about a half second and there's some hard drive activity going on there, with or without a swapfile.

Maybe that's just the way things are and I'm just being nitpicky. Maybe I need to install 8gb of ram, make a 6 gb ramdrive, install the game to the ramdrive and enjoy no hesitation ever. Or maybe I just need to realize that certain parts of games are going to hesitate and just be glad I've got a super fast video card for under $200.

Also, I changed my 1.5gb swapfile partition from ntfs to fat16 with a huge 64k cluster size (same size as the raid stripe size). Set up as ntfs, the master file table was in the middle of the swapfile which made it fragmented. Set up as fat16 with a small file allocation table at the beginning of the partition, it's all contiguous and I figure it's as fast as it'll ever be.

 

[IEC]

GOOD guide! I'm impressed and am considering doing this softmod to a 6800nu. STICKY IT MODS! *Does the stick... never mind*

 

[Kogan]

Originally posted by: 2Xtreme21
I'd try another driver, Kogan. These new ones really aren't that great when it comes to performace or IQ. They're merely there to introduce the 7800 series, I think.

http://www.tweaksrus.com Try the 77.62 Type 2's.

Thanks! I tried out those drivers and they worked great and gave me a bit of performance boost over the new 77.72's.

I was able to unlock my pipelines with these drivers and got even more performance, but had quite a few flickering textures. Nvidia must have disabled unlocking in the new drivers or something. Oh well, it was fun tinkering, but I can live with 4fps less