ATI Radeon 9800XT headache

[commodorejim]

Hello everyone,

I'm having a major headache with my Radeon 9800XT and was hoping someone here could point me in the right direction for a solution.

My system is a Dell Dimension 8300, exactly four years old this month. About three months ago, strange chequered patterns started appearing in Google Earth, though every other application and game seemed fine.

I decided to upgrade to the latest Catalyst release last week and things have gone downhill ever since. WIth the latest driver, things like scrolling in a browser have become very slow, and even moving a window across the screen. Google Earth refuses to start now, throwing up a dialog box with the title "DirectX mode not supported". Also, in the DirectX diagnostic tool, features such as DirectDraw Acceleration are listed as "Not Available". (I have DirectX 9.0c).

I've tried a number of possible fixes that I read in other posts on this forum - rolling back the driver to an earlier release was one, as someone said they didn't think the latest ATI drivers did not support AGP 100%. However, no release I've tried has worked.

I'd really be grateful if someone could throw some light on what may be wrong and how I might fix it.

Thanks.

 

[kimsland]

I decided to upgrade to the latest Catalyst release last week

System Restore to two weeks ago

 

[commodorejim]

Thanks for the response. I tried restoring to a week previously but the problem persists.

 

[kimsland]

Start -> Run -> devmgmt.msc -> OK
Click on the + sign to expand your Video device
Right click on your Expanded Video device, and select remove (or uninstall)
Restart
Load the original drivers from your Video Card CD, or download the older drivers for it

 

[commodorejim]

Thanks again for your suggestions but I'm afraid I've tried all that! I'm really running out of options and am now wondering if the card has some dodgy RAM.

 

[kimsland]

Could be

Here's the drivers page again, for your card:
http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=xp/radeonx-xp

There are alternatives there as well

 

[commodorejim]

No luck I'm afraid. Still the same problem persists. As a last resort, I'm going to take out the card, re-insert it and re-install drivers from scratch again. I'll let you know how I get on in the event that it works (or doesn't). Thanks for you responses.

 

[FireDawg]

I have had a 9800 xt pe version go bad just recently. drivers were not the problem just age of the card. i was getting green pixels everywear and card sometimes loaded games funny in textures.

 

[commodorejim]

Thanks for that FireDawg. Yes, I'm now thinking that my 9800 is on the way out, so it looks like I'll be buying a new Gfx card. Have tried absolutely everything I can think of, so at this stage coughing up some cash for a new card will be less painfull than all the pissing about I've been doing for the last week with drivers.

Can anyone recommend a decent AGP card? I'm not looking for a DirectX 10 one -just a reasonably priced card that can perform at a respectable (not cutting edge)level for gaming.

Thanks again to both FireDawg and kimsland for their responses.

 

[therickster90]

I guess you said you've already tried switching drivers, so I don't know how much this will help. But I have a 9550 and it didn't like any of the new ati drivers. When I would update, on restart directx stuff would be disabled. And I couldn't figure out how to enable them. So I uninstalled the new stuff and reinstalled either the driver from the cd or just some older ones off ati's site (i don't remember which) and everything worked again.