Symptom:
In a fresh installed PC with ATI Radeon (Sapphire) HD 2600 PRO 512MB AGP card Flight Simulator 2004 and Flight Simulator X is not starting. FS9 silently quits before displaying the main menu screen, FSX displays a black window only. FS9 starts normally in safe mode: fs9.exe -SWREND (software rendering, i.e. not using the cards features).
DirectX diagnostic tool dxdiag.exe Display tab/Direct3D test gives error: "Direct3D 7 test results: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x80004005 (Generic failure)".
Environment:
Sapphire HD2600 PRO 512MB AGP
MSI K7N2 Delta-ILRS AGP motherboard
AMD XP Athlon (Palomino) 2600/2 CPU
1GB 400MHz DDR RAM
Win XP Prof SP2 HU
.Net 1.1, 2.0, 3.0
DirectX 9.0c
Tests
The following drive versions are tested from
http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/xp/radeonxprevious-xp.html:
6-12, 7-7, 7-10, 7-11 and the newest one 7-12
Other pages like
https://www.techspot.com/drivers/driver/file/information/9395/ seems to forward the same pages during download.
Also the driver set from the card's own CD is tested. It is said to be Catalyst 7.10.
Also latest driver from
http://www.sapphiretech.com/us/support/drivers.php is tested.
Results
All driver sets from the ATI page fails. Earlier versionas fail with message:
"Setup did not find a driver compatible with your current hardware or operating system. Setup will now exit."
7-11 fails with:
"Setup was unable to find components that can be installed on your current hardware or software configuration. Please make sure you have the required hardware or software."
7-12 fails with no error message! Does not install any drivers.
The so called 7-10 version on the card's CD detects the card and installs normally!
The driver from Sapphire tech web page also installs normally.
Analysis
It seems that ATI leaves out the RADEON AGP cards from the installs. In the CX_*.inf files the following line is missing:
"ATI RADEON HD 2600 PRO AGP" = ...
This line exists both in the inf file of the CD of the card and in the package from Sapphire Tech.
Comments
I can not recall what had caused the problem for me at the first place. Maybe I immediatelly skipped the CD as I saw it is 7.10 and started with the drivers from the ATI page (recent one 7.12). Or maybe I started with the CD, but it had failed for a reason I can not examine now. Meanwhile I had updated the rather old NVIDIA nForce chipset on my motherboard and I do not want to reverse for the previous one for testing.
The most importatn thing is that for these video cards one should check the
http://www.sapphiretech.com/us/support/drivers.php page for new drivers instead of the ATI page. However the driver package is some 234MB here and the Catalyst package is 197MB. This is 10 times bigger than that of the same packages on the ATI page. One should check the reason.
Now I selected the version on the CD that includes all the ATI tools as well in a nice package.
Gabor