Question about AGP

In the preferences menu under 'Adv. Graphics' the box that says 'AGP graphics acceleration in shadowed out so i cant select it, and under that it says my card has 16mb of memory when it really has 128mb. Is this why alot of stuff renders slow? My video card is a GeForce fx 5200 ultra running in agp4x.

Yah that would be why it's running slow. But even if it was working 128mb isn't that much, i'd recommend you upgrade but thats just my opinion.

I don't know about your other problems though.

I recently upgraded my machine, and although the Linux client used to be faster on the old machine, the win32 client under WINE is now about 40% faster. This is all thanks to the 'use AGP' option under the win32 client - if I don't check it, both versions now run about the same speed.

I actually have almost no idea what this option technically does, but it sure helps.

(And I'm not even strictly on AGP! I have one of those 'fake AGP' AGI mobos.)

The slow rendering is nothing to do with AGP AFAIK. Things take a _long_ time to rez in the linux client, but this is due to problems with memory caching etc. AGP is broken at the moment in the Linux client tho. You can edit your config file to say that your gfx card has 512MB RAM which will speed things up a tiny bit.

The OP didn't say anything about rezzing, just rendering. The AGP option can certainly affect the latter.

Of course, anyone waiting for textures to rez nicely on the Linux client is currently doomed...

The AGP bus has a lot of optimizations specifically for graphics, without the AGP Graphics Acceleration (as mentioned, borked in Linux), your AGP card (even if it's onboard, by the way, it's still on an AGP bus, with the aforementioned optimizations, so it IS "real" AGP) will run as if it were on a PCI bus, basically (it's still faster, because it's on it's own bus, but it doesn't get a lot of optimizations it otherwise would).

The 16 Mb thing can be fixed, though. Look around this forum for the exact details, but basically, add
GraphicsMemorySetting 3
or something like that, to your settings.ini

Hope some of this was useful.

Well pointed out.. My post was sloppy. I just thought the OP may have meant rezzing rather than rendering, because you don't really "see" slow rendering, just reduced framerates.

The BIG difference with AGP comes in if it is activated in X at all. In /proc/driver/... somewhere, is an AGP entry. With NVidia, it is /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status, type "cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status". That tells you if AGP is active, and which speed, e.g:

Status: Enabled
Driver: AGPGART
AGP Rate: 4x
Fast Writes: Enabled
SBA: Enabled

If it is NOT enabled here, you can lose 50% of your framerate

I also can't check the AGP box in the Linux Client, so I don't know if that would speed things up some more...