AGP fastwrites

[ricvonhelms]

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone could tell me the meaning of AGP fastwrites and a reason to turn it on in my BIOS. It was off, and i have turned it on with no performance advance or degrade. im just not sure what is does. any thoughts?

[stratcatprowlin]

Its supposed to increase performance but most of the time it doesnt and it can cause stability issues.I would recommend leaving it disabled.

[Albis521]

but if it doesn't cause stability on my system, should i leave it on or will i get better preformance with it off

[Albuquerque]

I can enable it, but have never found any conclusive proof of it "enhancing" anything.

[Mr.Radar]

On Radeon cards (except the 9600 series) fastwrites cause serious stability issues and severely decrease performance, however I don't know about nVidia cards.

[stratcatprowlin]

I've tried it on Nvidia cards and it makes no difference at all.

[JigPu]

Direct evil copy from one of ATI's whitepapers on Smartgart (which will let you turn on and off Fastwrites among other things)

http://www.ati.com/products/catalyst/SMARTGART-White-Paper-V2.pdf
AGP Fast Writes
Fast writes allow the CPU to transfer graphics data directly to the graphics accelerator. Fast writes can be used to transfer such data as 2D operations, graphics data, or textures. Fast writes are disabled for many chipsets, as they are not capable of supporting this feature. There are also quite a few chipsets that claim support for fast writes, but in reality they are incompatible with the majority of available graphics accelerators.

Generally little speed impact is seen from enabling or disabling it (you can bench with it both on and off if you want to see), though if it does not cause any system instability, there is no reason to turn it off.
JigPu

[3line]

I can enable it, but have never found any conclusive proof of it "enhancing" anything.

My graphics bench from PcMark04 increased from 3900 to 5000 after enabling AGP fast write and 1 WS R/W. I need to do testing in the 3Dmarks, though.

No stability issues or artifacting whatsoever, though