ATI HD4600 and X-Plane 10 Error: Fix or time for a new build?

[limittrader]

Hi everyone and thanks for your help and patience. I'm finally throwing in the towel and admitting I don't understand this stuff. I've got an old custom built machine (circa 2009) that runs well but I'm thinking might be time to upgrade if I keep having to deal with things like this. It seems some of my components don't really like to work together and are getting old and slow. For example, right now I'm trying to install X-Plane 10 and am getting this error:

"Your graphics hardware cannon support X-Plane. X-Plane requires a graphics card with 16mb of VRAM and multitexturing..."

I have dual ATI Radeon HD 4600 cards installed which meet those requirements from what I've been able to find (however maybe I'm wrong..). I'm running Win8 64. Per this thread: LINK these cards are the AGP version and I need the 12.4 legacy (AGP hotfix) driver suit which is no longer available for download on the AMD site. The current package is 13-1 and when I install it doesn't change anything on my drivers and the problem persists. Windows just tells me "Your drivers are up to date!" Clearly. Thanks..

Is this fixable? Should I upgrade a few choice components? Start from scratch? You're insight is appreciated! I basically use my computer for finance software, some photoshop, and a game session here and there (x-plane hopefully and I just discovered War Thunder which looks fun!). Nothing too intense but I obviously like things to be quick, reliable etc. Thanks for your help!

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz
Intel(R) 5520/5500/X58
ATI Radeon HD 4600
Windows 8.1 64 bit

 

[COLGeek]

Those are not AGP devices, rather they are PCIe. AGP dates back well before the i7s came along.

These are the most current drivers for those video cards.

http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/legacy?product=legacy2&os=Windows%208%20-%2064

I would suggest removing one of the video cards and performing the installation of the drivers. Upon completion, re-install the second one and make sure to enable Crossfire in Catalyst when completed.

Good luck!

 

[limittrader]

Thanks COL! So I just tried all of that. A couple times. Removed, cleaned, unistalled, deleated anything with an ATI in it, put one in, installed, and....same problems (restarted between steps).

Interestingly the install log for the driver you linked me resulted in this error: "the specified driver program was not installed for matching devices." even though only one of the cards was in the computer.

Also, the CCC wont open. It says: "Catalyst Control Center cannot be started. There are currently no settings that can be configured using Catalyst Control Center." Looking in the processes, it is running in the background.

Any other ideas? Thanks again, appreciate it! If it comes down to it, could you recommend a new card that would work with the rest of what I have?

 

[COLGeek]

Sounds like a previous Crossfire configuration file/setting is being found by the system. Is this a system that was upgraded from Win 7 to Win 8.1, or did you perform a clean install of Windows 8.1?

 

[limittrader]

Clean install of 8 then the update to 8.1. Can't remember if I used the original driver discs or downloaded the updated drivers when I did the update.

 

[COLGeek]

Honestly, I would reload Windows from scratch at this point. Seems you have some registry corruption going on that could take forever to troubleshoot. I would install with only one GPU and add the second one after Windows installed.

 

[limittrader]

I had a feeling that's where this was heading. Thanks for the help! I'll report back in case anyone is curious how it turns out. Cheers!

 

[COLGeek]

Yes, please share your results. Good luck!