Settings: Miscellaneous

This works on all PCI/AGP cards. It does not work on most PCI-Express cards.

PCI Latency is used to control how long the video card can use the bus exclusively. The setting 255 is used on most video cards and is supposed to give best performance, since the card can use the bus for a long time (255 clocks).

If you experience sound problems, like stuttering, try playing with this value.

Side note- from BWX

excerpt taken from http://www.rojakpot.com/

This BIOS feature controls how long a PCI device can hold the PCI bus before another takes over. The longer the latency, the longer the PCI device can retain control of the bus before handing it over to another PCI device.

Normally, the PCI Latency Timer is set to 32 cycles. This means the active PCI device has to complete its transactions within 32 clock cycles or hand it over to the next PCI device.

For better PCI performance, a longer latency should be used. Try increasing it to 64 cycles or even 128 cycles. The optimal value for every system is different. You should benchmark your PCI cards’ performance after each change to determine the optimal PCI latency time for your system.

Please note that a longer PCI latency isn’t necessarily better. A long latency can also reduce performance as the other PCI devices queuing up may be stalled for too long. This is especially true with systems with many PCI devices or PCI devices that continuously write short bursts of data to the PCI bus. Such systems would work better with shorter PCI latencies as they allow rapid access to the PCI bus.

In addition, some time-critical PCI devices may not agree with a long latency. Such devices require priority access to the PCI bus which may not be possible if the PCI bus is held up by another device for a long period. In such cases, it is recommended that you keep to the default PCI latency of 32 cycles.

This function extracts the video bios from your card and stores it into a file on your system. This feature works only on cards using R300 and up.

—> This previous statement is wrong!!!

It is not the content of the VGABIOS-Chip (FLASH EEPROM) on the VGA card that will be extracted/stored to a file after pressing the button: “Dump BIOS” in the current ATITool version. The only thing which will be extracted/dumped by the current ATITool version is a slightly different copy of the VGABIOS shadow/mirror from a certain place the 0-1MB memory area.

This certain place/area is generally: “0x0C0000 - 0x0D0000”. So, the current version of ATITool just dumps the data from the mentioned memory area, not directly the content from the VGABIOS-Chip (FLASH EEPROM) on your ATI graphics card.

Background information: While booting a PC, the System BIOS copies the VGABIOS to the mentioned memory area: “0x0C000 - 0x0D000” (0×100000 = 1MB) and executes the code. While copying/executing some bytes will change and the mirrored VGABIOS is not exactly the same like the original VGABIOS in the FLASH EEPROM on your graphics card.

To get a decent and not changed VGABIOS dump, it is necessary to run “flash utils” which have + direct access to the graphic card’s FLASH EEPROM + the ability to make a backup of the data inside the graphic card’s FLASH EEPROM