Graphics trouble with mbox + xp, poor perfomance c/w PTfree on win98

[phil bax]

Hi Guys - I'm wondering if anyone else has run into this problem or has a solution....

I have installed Mbox on my XP system ( PIII 500 , 384 Mb ) having previously installed SP1. No installation issues, and PT 5.3.3 boots no problem. However, I am getting corrupted graphics in the edit page ( mixer is OK ). I can clean up the main page by checking/unchecking "draw grid" in the display preferences, but the group names, audio names are corrupt, by which I mean they are covered with black hash graphics. I can clean this temporarily by selecting/unselecting, but there is clearly something wrong, and I can't read a lot of necessary info.... any ideas ???
screen res is standard 1024 by 768 graphics adaptor is matrox mga100 4mb.

I know this is not a state of the art system, but I get drastically worse performance than I did with PT free under win98. Although the system performance indicators are barely tickling, I get "system held of interrupts for too long" message even with the lightest system load buffer of 1024 when playing the PT free demo song. Does Mbox . PTLE 5.3.3 and XP really load the system so much more, or do I have a conflict...

[caruso7r]

If you only have a 4mb video card, thats the reason why. i think the video card requirement
is at least 16megs maybe even 32megs

[phil bax]

Thanks for this - but I understand that the graphics card needs only to be AGP - 16 meg or more required for video playback according to the compatibility info. Is this info wrong, do I really need more graphics ram ? Displays of finer details like waveforms are clean and fast, the artefacts I'm getting remind me of buggy progs from atari days....

[caruso7r]

my two cents would be to get a newer graphics card
overall your performance will be better and i bet
that protools problem may go away!

[Greg M]

My graphics were fine with a 4 MB Nvidia card on a PII 300 Mhz with 5.3.1 and XP. I think there is something else wrong.

Greg

[phil bax]

Thanks everyone,

I've prodded around, and cured my graphics problem with a reduction in Hardware Accelleration. Never needed to do this before and I thought I'd used some pretty intensive graphics stuff in the past... Thanks alot for pointing me in the right direction.

I've improved my held off buffers error trouble by increasing CPU limit, but i see in other threads that people with much faster systems also have a problem. Sounds to me like some sort of conflict. Will keep investigating and I hope to be of help to others.