DOS ain't dead

Poor graphics performance on new intel core i5 system (Developers)

posted by RayeR , CZ, 21.12.2010, 01:15
(edited by RayeR on 21.12.2010, 01:37)

Hi,
I got a new PC at work. It's some HP model with intel core i5 750, 8GB RAM, intel H57 chipset and nVidia GT230 VGA. Performance is nice (for singlethread apps my home overcloked E8400 is much better :) but I'm not much happy with mobo peripherals. It has only 4 PCIe x1 + one x16 slots - no classic PCI. It also lacks COM/LPT (we had to buy extra PCIE x1 card), no IDE, no floppy port. So near completly purified of legacy stuff except the BIOS (with poor settings - as usual on Dell/HP mobos). So now I have a chance to test various DOS SW on this machine. Someone here may be interested in my short review to be prepared for future HW upgrade.

I repartitioned HDD and installed FreeDOS 2038 with JEMMEX on FAT32 partition without problem. SATA has BIOS options: AHCI, RAID, IDE. DOS can boot with all this settings becauseof INT13h extension. It reported about 3,3GB available XMS. BIOS provide USB keyboard and mouse emulation, ctmouse detected it as normal PS/2 mouse. I tried to run few utils. MPXplay detected HDA but I didn't have any mp3 there neither phones attached. My CPUID crashed when tried to read core temperature through MSRs so it will need some update. My VESATEST run but it shown very poor graphics performance in VESA BS and even LFB mode (tested 1024x768/32). I tested without and with write combining set by my MTRRLFBE. Results:

BankSwitch, MTRR unset: 28 MB/s (I got same value under WinXP)
BankSwitch, MTRR set to WC: 41 MB/s
LFB, MTRR unset: 29 MB/s
LFB, MTRR set to WC: 29 MB/s

As you can see it helped only for BankSwitched mode but LFB mode has no performance gain, WHY?

On my home system with intel P31 and GF7900GT (it seems that VGA type is not important) I got about 2600 MB/s, it's near 100x more. And good AGP system still make thousands of MB/s. So I'm disapponted but it may be specific only for this system. If someone else can test it and compare on different i3/5/7 system it would be helpful.

And here's PCI devices log

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

Complete thread:

• Poor graphics performance on new intel core i5 system - RayeR, 21.12.2010, 01:15 (Developers)
  • Poor graphics performance on new intel core i5 system - RayeR, 19.01.2011, 00:23
    • Poor graphics performance on new intel core i5 system - Laaca, 19.01.2011, 08:11
      • Poor graphics performance on new intel core i5 system - RayeR, 19.01.2011, 10:19
        • Poor graphics performance on new intel core i5 system - Laaca, 17.03.2011, 15:06
    • Poor graphics performance on new intel core i5 system - Rugxulo, 17.03.2011, 18:37