Radeon 9700pro/OGL (LOOOONG POST)

[Sillyworks]

This will turnout to be fairly lengthy I reckon.
I have a Sapphire Radeon 9700pro on an Asus A7N8X Deluxe (rev. 1.06). When I first built the system I immediately had problems with opengl games, specifically games based on Quake III engine (RTCW, ET and recently Call of DUty). This was with an XP 2400+ processor. These games would randomly lock up and required a system reset. Eventually, after MONTHS of frustration I set the AGP to 4x down from 8x. This immediately solved the crashing probs (yay!), which incidentally never happened with D3D games.

Anyway, I recently upgraded the processor to an Athlon XP 3200+ (the barton with 400mhz fsb). The opengl problems immediately happened again . Anyway, I discovered the advanced smartgart settings (start menu >> run >> type smartgart hit ok). This presents you with PCI read and write on and off and AGP read and write on and off. I set AGP read to off and AGP write to off and left PCI both on (tried other way round doesnt work). This appears to have solved the problem, however, it looks like it has impacted performance slightly in some games. Anyway, if you are experiencing the same problems this may help.

This problem has occurred with ALL ati driver releases since cat 3.4 (the ones bundled with the GFX card). I may try setting main ram down to a lower FSB speed and see if it is somehow the cards interactions (dont know the correct terminology here!) with system memory that causes the OGL probs. Hopefully ATI will sort this out soon, unlikely I know, but you would expect better from a £300 (in Dec 2002) video card.

Also, if anyone has any other suggestions I am as open as a loo door during a cholera outbreak to them. Thanks

 

[DDoMM]

Hay, Welcome To TechSpot :grinthumb

Put all of your settings back to how they were (AGP 8x etc) i dont think this is causing your problem, if its ONLY happening in OpenGL games and your running Windows XP then im 95% sure you need to get a Glide Wrapper, all of these older OpenGL games your playing could possibly be incompatible with your hardware and Windows XP, i had the same problem with Carmageddon 2 (1998)

I fixed my problem by downloading a patch which was released for it making it compatible with windows XP, this howeer only partially solved my problem, the game was completely incompatible with XP (it was designed for Windows 95) so i had to somehow fool it into thinking it was running on Windows 95, Windows Compatability mode fixed that problem (right click your shortcut to the game, click on the Compatability tab and select an onlder operating system).....this again only solved the problem partially, the game still crashed, i figured this was because my Radeon 9700 Pro has abandoned any support it had for OpenGL, so i needed to somnehow fool the game into thinking i had a 3DFX OpenGL graphics card, this was done by downloading a thing called a Glide Wrapper, i used one called eVoodoo, you can get it here...

http://www.voodoofiles.com/type.asp?cat_id=14

it fools the game into thinking your running a 3DFX card and it runs perfectly now on my system, so try that, if you still have trouble, post back.

Hope this helps :grinthumb

 

[Didou]

You should run the Ram in sync with the FSB which in your case would mean 133mhz ( 266 DDR / PC2100 ) since the 2400+ should be at 7.5 x 133. The nForce2 chipset does not like to run the memory & FSB out of sync & running it that could lead to problems other then a simple performance decrease.

You can also try to go in the BIOS & set performance level to Normal rather then Optimal, that makes the memory run at less aggressive timings & might help you with your stability issues.

Try those two suggestions & see if you still get problems with OpenGL games. Do not install a Glide wrapper unless you are trying to run old games which only use Glide ( 3dfx's proprietary API ) such as Pandemonium, etc.

PS. Welcome to TechSpot. Hope you enjoy your stay.:wave:

 

[Sillyworks]

Thanks for the replies guys. I have tried all of those things, except the glide wrapper which I dont think will help anyway (thanks though ) Anyway, I solved the issues when I was using the XP2400+ but I have now upgraded to an XP3200+ and the opengl issue has returned, with both memory and FSB at 200mhz, in-sync basically. However, I have borrowed a spare radeon 9600 from a friend (rich friends I know ). This card runs with absolutely no problems (so far) at AGP 8x and at the settings which would have caused the 9700pro to crash. This makes me suspect that the 9700 has a fault, but I dont know what would cause it to crash with opengl and not D3D at these settings. Admittedly I know little about how pcs work anyway, but maybe this rings a bell in somebodies cranium

Thanks for reading again, and thanks for the welcome

 

[Sillyworks]

Ok, the radeon 9600 had the same issues. I have changed the memory to cas 2.5 from 2 (which is what its rated at ) and put the 9700pro back in. I have managed about 30 mins on call of duty so far and it seems to be ok. If anyone is interested ill post back if it seems ok.

p.s. My Ram is Corsair XMS3200, 2x256MB.