[DMDX] Re: TimeDX & Windows XP 
Thanks Jonathan, that makes things clearer. I was under the impression that the
acid test was less of a load than the retrace test, but if things are 
the other way
around it makes perfect sense again. Certainly now that you''ve told 
us that these
long sleep times are not uncommon and nothing to worry about.

I'll just run the acid test from now on, and if that one runs fine 
I'll stop worrying.

Thanks again,

Maarten


At 15:46 16/11/2005, you wrote:

>The Vertical Sync Test is actually the most demanding thing that 
>exists because it blits whole video screens of diagnostics as often 
>as it can.  The Tachistoscopic Acid Test on the other hand merely 
>blits the region of the screen that is changing, the text and the 
>immediate area around it.  The Tachistoscopic Acid Test is designed 
>to behave as DMDX would under it's most demanding situations whereas 
>the Vertical Sync Test is testing whether we can sync with the video 
>card and unfortunately the amount of diagnostic spew it makes 
>presents a bit of a strain on some machines, it's not designed to 
>behave like DMDX does.  That is why DMDX executes just fine, it is 
>closer to the Tachistoscopic Acid Test in execution.  The Vertical 
>Sync Test would have to be de-tuned quite a bit to get it down to 
>normal loads and I haven't bothered to do it because of all the 
>users you are the only one to have ever noticed -- and it would 
>interfere with the test. So it stands as is.  I spent quite some 
>time tracking down what was happening there and watching the 
>machines around here that reported unusually long sleep times (it's 
>not uncommon) and finally figured out what's happening and it's non 
>issue.  You can use test modes 2, 3 and 4 to monitor what's 
>happening as DMDX runs but I'll bet they're fine as you see the 
>Tachistoscopic Acid Test is just fine.
>
>At 02:08 PM 11/16/2005 +0000, you wrote:
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>We are still having trouble making TimeDX work properly with
>>Windows XP. On some machines everything seems to work fine, on
>>others it doesn't and sometimes it depends on the videomode.
>>
>>The latest discovery is that things can fail in the vertical 
>>retrace sync test,
>>but then are fine when we do the tachistiscopic acid test.
>>
>>The problem in the vertical retrace test (or 'Time video mode' test) is that
>>the reported sleep times are often much longer than the requested sleep
>>time, resulting in many timeouts and multiply timeouts. These things
>>son't happen at all in the acid test, even with demanding settings.
>>
>>Aren't the vertical retrace test and the tachistiscopic acid test supposed
>>to use the same underlying code? And isn't the latter supposed to be more
>>demanding? These results are a bit puzzling and seem to indicate that the
>>vertical retrace test isn't working correctly.
>>
>>Another reason to think that this is the case is the fact that no problems
>>have been reported yet for that specific machine when using DMDX.
>>
>>Maarten
>>
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