PCIe graphics slow (bad lanes?)

[bruce56]

I was checking out an old PC (Intel 965 chipset) and drawing the display
seems rather slow. I swapped the graphics card with another aged PC
of same chipset and RAM and CPU speed. The slowness seems to be the mainboard,
not due to graphics card. I checked BIOS settings, and couldn't see anything
that might drag it down.
I know that PCIe 2 or 3 can fall back to a lower speed, but these are
PCIe 1.1 already. So I wonder about lanes. What if the mainboard has a
dud lane - does the graphics card drop down to x8 (or less)?

 

[Paul]

I was checking out an old PC (Intel 965 chipset) and drawing the display
seems rather slow. I swapped the graphics card with another aged PC
of same chipset and RAM and CPU speed. The slowness seems to be the mainboard,
not due to graphics card. I checked BIOS settings, and couldn't see anything
that might drag it down.
I know that PCIe 2 or 3 can fall back to a lower speed, but these are
PCIe 1.1 already. So I wonder about lanes. What if the mainboard has a
dud lane - does the graphics card drop down to x8 (or less)?

I would suspect acceleration is entirely disabled.

You have a slider for the amount of acceleration.
The slider should be pushed to Full.

Display Control Panel : Settings : Advanced : Troubleshoot : Hardware Acceleration

You can also try running DXDIAG.

In this example, you can see all "features" are "Enabled".
On older OSes, there were buttons to press, to do simple
3D test cases as well (rotating cube). The buttons aren't
present here.

http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/ii230/T3h_Appl3/dxdiag_video_zps967e0940.jpg

*******

With regard to your lane theory, you'd need a utility that
can show the current interface speed or active lane count.

GPU-Z shows the current lane connection state. Mine shows
"PCI-E 1.1 x16 @ x16 1.1". There is also a button to click,
which defeats power saving, and causes the card to flip to
3D mode. And that may correct the impression of a low
lane count. Apparently it's possible to turn the lanes
off dynamically, at idle. I don't think mine does that.
My card is "too old for tricks".

http://us1-dl.techpowerup.com//SysInfo/GPU-Z/GPU-Z.0.7.2.exe

Paul