ET6000 - do You remember it?

[ding]

Hi Everybody,

I've got some troubles in getting good performance out of a ET6000 based graphics card with 2,25 MB of MDRAM. I heard a lot of this card before, and decided to replace my S3 Virge 4MB with it. The problem is that in 24bit color modes, the fullscreen video performance is much worse than S3 Virge's one... What could be the reason? Is there any way of improving ET6000's performance? I really can't believe that low-end S3virge overtakes the 128bit ET6000...

The CPU is P200MMX
64MB RAM
Mainboard is ECS P5HX-B

Counting on you :)

Ding

[michaelwest]

I suggest you upgrade your video card and buy either a Geforce or a Voodoo card.

If you don't have the money or your computer won't support it then at least download the latest drivers for the video card.

[LostBok]

pc_old - look at his spec! this is NOT a GeForce System... even a TnT woudl probably be too much for it... if you're talking about 3D performance, then dual Voodo2-SLI would be as much as it could take... in terms of 2D perfomance, my VideoLogic ET6000 was V good... not sure about ASF file playback, but I KNOW the MPEG playback was AWESOME... way better than any other cards at that time... I had the card originally in a Cyrix P120+, which was able to do 1024x768 16bit full screen MPEG... 29.5fps with Rate Control on and 95fps with rate control off. I can dig out the ET6000 specialised version of Xing for you somewhere so that you've got the correct codecs available... like I said, not sure about AVI and ASF though... think the CPU would struggle with ASF files though... I know my friend's PC did with a P200mmx, 64meg RAM and Voodoo3 3000...

[ding]

Thank you for your response!

I've found the reason of my ET6000s poor 24bit fullscreen perf. - it's the video memory that fails.. I mean the 4 Megs version would play the fullscreen video without any hassle.
As I said in my previous post, the 4Meg Virge was actually faster in playing fullscreen movies in 24bit color, but when I took additional RAM out, so only the base 2megs were on board the same symptoms appeared - good 24bit window playback, very poor in fullscreen mode.

Unfortunately MDRAMs used in ET6x00 cards are simply impossible to find making memory upgrade out of the question, so I'd have to look for a 4 (or 4,5) Megs ET6x00 card on the second-hand market. :(

The other trouble is that even the newest ET6K driver doesn't support 32bit color modes, that are actually much faster than 24bit ones.. :(

The overall performance (measured in benchmarks) of my current 2Meg ET6000 (overclocked to 110MHz) in 2D (GUI) and 16bit color video playback is similar to RIVA 128/ZX AGP :D , and it's far better than S3 Virge/GX 4MB one-cycle EDO, Ati 3D Rage II 8MB SGRAM, and so on...

If it comes to the Xing player - If you could find it somewhere - well - that would be great!

Best regards

Ding

[NDD]

I just mentioned this card few days ago :)

The unofficial ET6000 homepage (http://hjem.get2net.dk/et6000/)

Best Regards ...

[Slipknot]

I remeber that chipset. **** good 2D in windows. Good enough that even Matrox (king of 2d back in the day) released a card using the chipset. I think Tseng Labs made it, but i'm not sure. Some of the boards with that chipset had spare sockets for extra ram (square in shape normally). Either way, If you plan on upgrading your computer system in teh future, you might as well start with teh video card now because that card has absolutly '0' 3D fetures on it. That is one of the reasons matrox licensed the original kyro tile technology made their own 3d own add in card. I think that was called the M3D. I think you've reached the point of dimenishing returns on that video card.

[outlaw_revolver]

Running 2 voodoo2's? Hehe that sounds cool I remember my voodoo2 back in the day... then 3 then 4 then 5 then geforce2 took it all over..

[SEALTEAMTHREE]

I have an old Voodoo Banshee PCI card that works great in 1997-99ish games (the newest I ran it on was Half-Life with FLAWLESS preformace) that ran in a system with less power than that (Pentium 133 STANDARD, 64 MB EDO-RAM). You might want to look into one if you can't afford an upgrade to a AGP compliant system, or a different CPU. The one I had was called the Diamond Monster Fusion. The Voodoo Banshee was 3dfx's "go-between" chipset between the VD2 and VD3. You could probably snag one off e-bay for less than $75. I'd sell you mine, but I still have it in my old system. Good Luck!