Does pci gfx card mem really increase Fast Mem ???

[Effy]

I think I have asked it before but didn't get a clear answer. I now have got a bare A4000 with 3.1 chips and an empty harddrive. The motherboard has got 16 Mb Fast Mem and that's it. I sold my MK2 68060+scsi for 180 euro and got an original 68040/25 instead. Seemed a fair deal. Now I wanna raise the memory, and I have got a Voodoo4 pci 32 Mb ready, got it from german Ebay a half year ago. The question is : if I use that card with a Mediator, do I really get 32 Mb extra Fast Ram ? Yes or no ? Do I get then 48 Mb Fast Ram If not then the only options to increase Ram are a turboboard or a Z3 card to put Ram on ...  :-?

[Karlos]

Effy wrote:
I sold my MK2 68060+scsi for 180 euro and got an original 68040/25 instead. Seemed a fair deal.

:-?

-edit-

I failed to understand this part. Trading in an 060/SCSI for a 3640 card? Hows that a good deal?

[NeRP]

No, the video card ram is not used as fast ram.  You're now basically screwed.  There is not easy way to get good 32 bit memory on an A3000/A4000 if you accelerator does not support it.  You could get a zorro card like the DKB card, but they were about the $200US mark when I was looking at them, *if* someone would even part with it.  For that reason alone, I stayed with the 3640 card until I could afford a CSPPC

There are lots of cheap cards out there to add 16bit ram, but remember that your machine is going to crawl the moment you use that ram.

[Karlos]

You certianly wont get the video cards RAM as fast ram, and even if you did, the bandwidth isnt that fabulous. Some tests I got a few users here to run a while ago showed that even for accelerated systems, transfers across the mediator to the video cards' memory was not particularly quick (between 8-12 M/s depending on exact config).

I think the confusion on the memory issue may have arisen from the various things I've seen written about using some of the video cards SGRAM to accelerate transfers between other PCI devices on the bus.

Whilst this may be true, it has no effect on communication between the CPU / PCI devices.

Id say ditch the 3640 and find an accelerator with local memory ASAP.

[Eniodis]

Hello,

I've got an A1230 + Mediator PCI. I don't know if it's the same with an A4000 but it works with mine : just download WBCtrl from the Aminet.

Add :
WBCtrl IMT=FAST
in your user-startup and the memory from the Mediator should appear in your Fast RAM. So you should then get 16+32 Mb Fast

[ksk]

(almost) everything is possible on Amiga.
But not everything is sensible.


A3640 does even slower memory operations than 030 card on the A4k (Also A1200 with 030 beat A3640 in things like video playback).

Why did you sell the MK2 in the first place?

I have MK1 (&128MB RAM) and I would never ever downgrade to 040. (060 with SCSI would be the dream come true for my 68k Amiga...)

[NeRP]

>Add :
>WBCtrl IMT=FAST
>in your user-startup and the memory from the Mediator should appear in your Fast RAM. So you should then get 16+32 Mb Fast

Hmmm, I looked that up right away out of extreme curiousity.... here is the entry from the .doc

To me, it looks like that is the same function as the 'Images in: Other memory' of WB3.9's workbench.prefs

------

 IMT=IMAGEMEMTYPE/K: when set to FAST or ANY, wb and icon.lib will
  use fastram for imagedata (p96/cgx or fblit required!). Use
  CHIP for chipram. It's safe to use this option without p96/cgx
  as WBCtrl will check for an RTG system / fblit before actually
  performing the change. If you use fblit by Stephen Brookes,
  you should use ICONFAST instead of FAST to avoid problems
  with workbench.library. Last but not least WBFAST tells wb
  to use fastram for imagedata and resets icon.library to use
  chipram.

[Piru]

@Eniodis

I've got an A1230 + Mediator PCI. I don't know if it's the same with an A4000 but it works with mine : just download WBCtrl from the Aminet.

Add :
WBCtrl IMT=FAST
in your user-startup and the memory from the Mediator should appear in your Fast RAM. So you should then get 16+32 Mb Fast

That is NOT true.

You will NOT get more fast memory with that, only less.

IMT=FAST will only instruct Workbench to load icons to fast memory.

[CU_AMiGA]

Yes, that only loads the Workbench images into Fast Ram, as said before. I use it.

[CU_AMiGA]

I don't want to sound rude or anything but WHY did you bleating get rid of that 060 one and then replace it for an 040? One of the most bizarre discisions i have ever witnessed.  :-?

[Kronos]

Well you will save RAM, by having bitmaps stored in the GFX-card, but
since you are updateing fom pure AGAmost of the saved mem would
be Chip. Normally you will allways have ~1.9MB Chip free, and maybe
even a few bytes of Fast (dependeing on what patches you ran on AGA,
and what settings you use for the Voodoo).

[Eniodis]

I've got an A1230 + Mediator PCI. I don't know if it's the same with an A4000 but it works with mine : just download WBCtrl from the Aminet.

Add :
WBCtrl IMT=FAST
in your user-startup and the memory from the Mediator should appear in your Fast RAM. So you should then get 16+32 Mb Fast
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That is NOT true.

You will NOT get more fast memory with that, only less.

IMT=FAST will only instruct Workbench to load icons to fast memory.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yes, you're right. Memory makes me defaults since I don't really use my Amiga for any other platform :roll:

Sorry for this mis-information

[Effy]

Seems like a lot of feedback that I`m getting ...
I first wanted to sell my A4000 but nobody was interested. Then a guy from Belgium, local that is, offered me to buy my MK2 for the price of 180 euro+his 68040/25. I didn't just trade my MK2 against an ordinary 68040, don't get me wrong.
About the Fast mem then. It seems that I can't use the gfx mem of a Voodoo4 as Fast mem. But can I instead redirect as much calls as possible to the so called Chip Ram ?? Would that help ?? I shall probably, as mentionned before, have only maximum 1.9 Mb of memory, but since there's 32 Mb to be filled I might be so lucky to save a lot of Fast mem ..., am I wrong ?? This is very new to  me ...

[Kronos]

Yes you are wrong :-o

There are3 kinds of RAM in your system (only 2 atm to be precise).

1. FastMem: Those 16MB on the mobo
2. ChipMem: 2MB also on the mobo, much slower in access, but the only
kind of RAM that the AGA-chips can use (listed as GFX-Mem in the title-bar).
3. RTG-Mem: Everything on the GFX-card(won't be directly listed anywhere).

Now what you will want is this:

Redirect as much as possible from Chip to Fast as this is about 6 times faster.
Patches likes FastBlit will do that.

Once you get the Voodoo you might want to move any GFX-related data into
the RAM on the card freeing much-needed FastMem. That should happen on itself,
some GFXApps may have an option where you can select the type of mem to be
used for buffers and so.

[Karlos]

Effy wrote:

Then a guy from Belgium, local that is, offered me to buy my MK2 for the price of 180 euro+his 68040/25. I didn't just trade my MK2 against an ordinary 68040, don't get me wrong.

Sorry man, but that guy must have been laughing his a*se off afterwards. He got shot of his 3640 card and replaced it with a vastly superior one for just 180 euro..