Radeon 64DDR glitches. Advice please?

[Guest]

I just upgraded from a Diamond Monster voodoo2-12 to a Radeon 64DDR. Sierra Screamin 3d was the 2d card.

Problems are:
1)Vertical lines in all incidents of transparancies in games (smoke,fog,clouds,water,lightsources)
2)Lockups at random in the 3 games I play (Unreal Tournament,Everquest,Asheron's Call)
3)Occasional lockups while booting up or while browsing the net.

I have flashed the bios, installed the latest DX8, installed the latest Ati Radeon drivers.
The only reference to AGP I could find in the cmos was a choice of either PCI,AGP or AGP,PCI. I changed it to the latter.

I'm about at the end of my technical know-how and would appreciate your help.

System:
P2-300
128meg ram
6gig 5200 HD
Asus P2L97 440LX motherboard

I will be upgrading the MB and CPU in a month but wanted some speed gain until then.

Any recommendation on MB-CPU combo for gaming?
I havent had much luck with non-intel in the past (cyrix & AMD)
I was thinking of a P3-1ghz but have no idea what MB to get.

Thank you
-Fallow-

 

[noko]

From my own experience the IWILL KK266 and the Radeon is a perfect match or at least very complimentary to each other. Unless you totally clear out all Voodoo drivers you will probably have problems with the new Radeon card. Do a search and type in <b>3dfx*</b> and delete all files that are found with this wild card. Also in Regedit do a search by typing in 3dfx and delete all those keys. A new installation after a format usually clears up alot of problems but since you will be upgrading soon maybe the above will get you by.

 

[Guest]

Quick ques, check the ATI support pages yet on the Radeon?
Nothing about lockups, but the vertical lines you describe
are pretty close to what ATi describes as problems with
anti-aliasing. Check @ http://support.ati.com/products/pc/radeon/radeon_issues.html
for all current probs with Radeon.

 

[Guest]

Vertical lines are a sign of bad video memory! Send the card back under warranty or I would suggest getting a Geforce card. The GPU(processor) on the video card dramatically reduces the load on your CPU(under unreal tournament you can go from 60% CPU usage(TNT 2) to 15% cpu usage(Geforce ddr)).

 

[noko]

The Radeon has diagnostic test which you can perform on it from the drivers that check the memory. If doing the self diagnostics it finds the memory bad ATI will probably replace the card for free. The Radeon is a GPU chip.

 

[jclw]

Have at look at the forums over at <A HREF="http://www.rage3d.com" target="_new">http://www.rage3d.com</A>. It's a site devoted to ATI cards.

 

[phsstpok]

Noko, sorry to change the subject but I thought you might have some ideas. (Actually, I guess this could also be called a Radeon glitch).

I installed a Radeon SDR PCI card in my friend's Dell model L800r computer. (I know. PCI! Yuck! What can I say? The computer doesn't have an AGP slot). The card seemed to be working well. All the game demos I brought along worked and so did 3DMark 2000. The Radeon PCI scored a low 3560 without any tweaking but since I have seen AGP cards (not many) score that low I figured it was acceptable given the PCI interface. When I ran 3DMark 2001 things continued to work reasonably well. I expected big problems in the high-detail scenes and this was definitely the case, very slow!

A problem showed up when 3DMark 2001 got to the Lobby Scene. (I can't remember if it was low or high detail scene). Actions seemed normal, if slow, but Max's coat had zero texture. The coat was just white instead of appearing like black leather. Shortly after that scene the program crashed.

Do you have any ideas what could be wrong?

My friend didn't seem to care because all of his racing games were working. He is just happy to be able to use 32-bit color with most of the bells and whistles activated, albeit at only 640x480 and possibly 800x600. At 1024x768, play was not really very good unless most enhancements disabled.

The Radeon PCI came with the xxx.7075 drivers which I believe are the latest official drivers. I did not have any of the beta drivers at the time. What problems do these betas address? What improvements? I'll check at www.rage3D.com but I thought you might also have some insight regarding this problem.

Thanks.

Phsstpok

 

[noko]

The Radeon is probably running out of onboard memory in 3dMark2001 and being smacked severly with pci transfer rates. Here is some tricks that may work.
1. Under <b>Disply and CPU Settings</b> change <b>Z-Buffer Depth</b> to <b>24</b>
2. Ensure <b>Frame Buffer</b> is set to <b>Double</b>
3. <b>Texture Format</b> set to <b>Compressed</b> or try out <b>16bit</b> to see if the problem improves.
4. Also try a lower resolution to see if abnormaly goes away.

Anyways this should increase the available on board memory vice using the very slow pci bus to trasfer texture data. Still the cpu has to send polygon information to the card via the pci bus which will be the bottleneck in this card. Recommend you try the following Special Purpose driver 4.13.7093

<A HREF="http://support.ati.com/products/pc/radeon/winme/radeon_winme_drivers.html" target="_new">http://support.ati.com/products/pc/radeon/winme/radeon_winme_drivers.html</A>

Also download Raid-on Tweaker and use the 3dMark2001 profile. You might want to play around with over clocking also, just do it in small increments in Raid-on Tweaker.
<A HREF="http://www.tweakfiles.com/video/raidontweaker.html" target="_new">http://www.tweakfiles.com/video/raidontweaker.html</A>

I was thinking of getting one of these cards myself to work with my Radeon64 to get a dual display. Two Radeons working in tandem sounds cool. Anyways please let me know how this works out.

 

[phsstpok]

Thanks for the links, Noko.

I will give your ideas a try when I get the chance. I only have access to my friend's system on the weekends. I should have borrowed it before installing it. That way I could have worked on any problems on my own time.

Do Radeon's have a tendancy to overheat? My friend and I both thought we smelled something when I was giving the card a workout. Nothing smelled burned, more like the smell from a dusty power supply or television. I think it was just some residual dust after cleaning the inside of the computer. Just in case it was heat problem I moved the other two other PCI cards as far away from the video card as possible. I am a little worried about the lack of ventilation in the micro-ATX case.

Probably won't do any overclocking for that reason but I will try your other tips.

By the way, what makes the 7093 Special Driver so "special"?

 

[noko]

The Radeon chip run rather cool and ATI only installed a small fan for cosmetic purposes. Through it does help in overclocking which ATI frowns against, still a larger heat sink and fan helps even better. What makes the 7093 drivers so special is that ATI doesn't have to answer your complaints about them. No just kidding, they are a more advance set of drivers that usually address some game issues from the previous set. Note to the wise, tweaking with the tweaking programs can also degrade performance which can be easily cleared by going to default on the profile in Raid-on tweaker. Have fun and feel free to ask anything else. Just remember no AGP does have a big performance hit for a Radeon.

 

[jclw]

Just for comparison on my AGP 2x Radeon 32 SDRAM I get 4900 in 3Dmark2000 and 2400 in 3Dmark2001.

My Radeon runs cold, even if I o/c it to 210/185 (from 163/163).

 

[phsstpok]

Do you recall what it scored not overclocked? Also what processor and speed are you using?

Thanks.

 

[phsstpok]

I figured there would be a big hit but I couldn't find any reviews so I decided that the Radeon PCI had to be better than the Intel 810 graphics and it is. I'd say the Radeon PCI performs about the same as my Geforce256 SDR (when it is not overclocked) in resolutions up to 1024x768 as long as the amount of detail is not set too high. Otherwise, it really bogs down. This is subjective as I did not have time to do a head to head comparison. As I said it was good enough for my friend, for now.

Thanks again for your help, all your help.