Achim Trensz writes:
I now have a USB-ISDN adapter installed. I am also using an SLI-V2 combo, on a system tantamount to being a PII/400, with an SB Live being the soundboard.
I'd like to report my findings with regard to two items of interest connected to GPL, i.e. the cooperation of GPL with an external ISDN-USB adapter, and the interaction between USB and my V2-SLI combo, as there have been reports about fps hits when combining V2 cards with USB devices.
The adapter - a Fritz!Card USB - installs its drivers, CAPI 2.0, and the CAPI-ports, and then it installs several virtual modems, one of which (called "PPP in ISDN") I use for connecting to my ISP.
All the virtual modems appear in the list of connection devices within GPL, but I of course still select the "TCP/IP" element of that list.
The first good news is that the new type of connection (ISDN) and of connection device (USB) seem to be fully transparent for GPL.
GPL continued to work with this new setup in the same way it did before with my analog modem, without any additional preparations or technical tricks or gimmicks etc. GPL does not seem to have any problems at all with this new hardware.
And as for the drop of fps when combining USB devices with V2-cards in GPL, I could not see this effect.
Of course, my system is quite fast and I optimized it in all aspects, i.e. within Windows by eliminating all timers and other hidden CPU users (I don't even load Systray.exe), and in the BIOS by optimizing all parameters, disabling all timers there, too, enabling the advanced PCI features etc. So, my system has always been flawlessly fast and might simply have enough power to overcome any minor performance drop USB might cause together with the V2's.
Another aspect might be that ISDN gives me an fps advantage over analog, and that this advantage balances out the possible drop in fps caused by the USB/V2 combination.
So, all I can safely say is that I do not see any drop in performance and fps, but rather I do see an improvement instead. I don't count fps, as I always get indicated 36fps online anyway, but the occasional choppiness experienced with several known hosts I connect to frequently was clearly improved, and there were no white flashes in yesterday's tests despite the fact that the Net wasn't too good last evening.
I'll of course continue to use this setup, and will keep you updated if I have any further findings. But so far, I have seen neither problems between GPL and ISDN, nor between the V2 and USB.