Erroneously detected PCI mode...

SL always detects my gfx card as being in PCI mode for some reason.
It isnt. I know this very well because it used to be in PCI mode for the first day or two that I had it, and I switched it to AGP in a hurry because I couldnt run SL at all, getting like 0.1 fps or something when I logged on.
I get decent performance and stability and control panel does list it as AGP4X.
SL lets me select the AGP acceleration checkbox, as well as all others, and generally seems to work fine EXCEPT for the initial popup warning and the about box listing my card as PCI.
I have the recommended driver version, the first thing I did when I got this new card was to download the drivers listed on the SL page. This has been going on for months across a wide range of game versions and I'm only really reporting it out of boredom since I dont have any real problems with the game.
Oh, it's an nvidia fx5200, creative labs version.

Eggy, incorrectly detecting PCI mode usually means that the AGP drivers for your motherboard are out of date. If you update those drivers, AGP mode should be detected correctly, and you should see a fairly substantial performance improvement.

In particular, this tends to happen on older Intel chipsets, and various non-Intel chipsets (VIA, SiS, etc.)

There's an article in the knowledge base on how to do this, I think, but I forget the title.

- Doug

Either I don't understand what you're saying or you don't understand what I said =)
My motherboard drivers are up to date. Whether I have my card in PCI or AGP mode it detects PCI mode.
In true PCI mode SL is unplayable, as one might expect.
In the erroneously detected PCI mode I get great performance - up to 50fps in extreme cases where there's not much to render, but more often 10 to 20fps. Were I to disable the little pop-up message at startup, I wouldn't even notice anything wrong with the game.
I have an AliMagik chipset on an Asus A7A mobo. My BIOS isnt updated because my floppy died, though all the latest drivers and patches are installed.
It's not really a problem but I was bored and decided to post about it.

I was getting this too and your post prompted me to look into it.

I have GF4 and an old AMD 1.2 (thunderbird) cpu and Asus motherboard. All drivers were up to date but still got AGP disabled warnings.

Turns out I had to install seperate AGP drivers from Acer. It is here:

http://www.ali.com.tw/eng/support/support_driver.htm
(just pick 'Search by driver' options AGP Driver.)

My FPS is now 22ish up from 8ish.

Oh, great idea, I was only checking the asus site really. I too have an old 1.333 Tbird. God damn AMD for changing their CPUs like a week after I bought mine. Now I cant upgrade!

Hehe I got mine when it was the latest greatest. I think I paid almost $1000 (cdn) for that Tbird. :/

I have a similar problem (except the only problem is that one pop-up message, everything else seems to work fine). I think it told me that I needed the latest Direct-X driver. When I checked it turned out that the Direct-X version I had was actually LATER than the one SL was looking for. I'm guessing that the way they check for current drivers may need some looking into.

Ick. ALi has issues with nVidia based cards.. Since you have a newer card, you can probably "force" the AGP into reporting correctly. See:
http://www.ali.com.tw/eng/support/support_guide_agp.htm

Had the same problem before I got my nForce 2 based board...

My chipset is a 1533 not a 1647, and AGP *is* enabled - want some screenshots of my control panel? =)
Every game works fine, *including* SL.
It's just that I still get the popup
I'll try the file suggested by madox later and let you know if it works.
*yawns* time for my afternoon nap =)

Alondria - I think that is old information that no longer is valid. I came across that too, last night, and it didn't work for me, at least :/

Hmm...

Eggy, the popup that you get detecting PCI mode comes from the value that we read directly out of the GL renderer string.

Now we don't actually use this string to determine whether or not to use AGP - we actually do that by querying the GL extension directly. However, we've found that when the driver is running in PCI mode, this almost always correlates with us not being able to allocate AGP memory using the extension.

Did you actually update your AGP drivers using the latest drivers from the ALi site?

- Doug

I have downloaded the drivers from the ALi site now, but I hadn't previously. I was only checking the asus site for uptaded drivers and had no idea the chipset manufacturer would have his own drivers up for download.
After installing the ALi drivers I am noticing 50% increased performance! Amazing! 20-30fps most of the time.
But... SL still reports me as running in PCI mode. How odd.
I attached a screenshot showing my control panel saying AGP4x, the about box saying PCI, and the ALT-1 thingy showing me running at 30fps.

Hmmm looks like theres no attachment on it... let me try again.

Eggy - if you run dxdiag from the Start->Run thing, look in the display tab to see if that is also reporting you as having AGP texture acceleration off. (just curious).

Now I'm wondering why you are getting always over 30 fps and I get low 20s I mean you have 256M ram even!

Yep, dxdiag shows the same as you.
As for the perfirmance I dont always get 30 fps of course... i was just alone with no avs to render.

Not the same as me That AGP driver did the trick for me 100%. Odd since it almost the same system.

Well, I'm at the end of my AGP knowledge. At least you are getting high fps now maybe you don't need that popup actaully saying AGP. heh

Could it be that im running an AGP8x card on an AGP4x slot?