Anyone using an ATI Radeon HD 3850 AGP?

[Slick Wilhelm]

My trusty ATI X850XT is finally starting to have fan issues after three years of sterling service, so yesterday I ordered a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 3850 from newegg.com.

Just wondering if anyone is using the AGP version of this card, and what I can expect to gain in performance.

Here's my aging AGP-based rig's specs:

Intel Prescott P4 3.2 OC'd to 3.36 mhz
Asus P4C800 Deluxe
2GB Kingston Hyper-X DDR400 SDRAM
2x250GB Seagate Barracuda SATA HD
Antec Sonata case with Antec 430W PS
LG 22" Widescreen 2 MS LCD monitor

This will definitely be the last AGP video card for this system. I'm going to try to get to 2009 with this system then build myself a new gaming rig for Christmas. Right now in SH4, playing at 1680x1050, using 2x AA and 2x AF, and most sliders in the middle, I'm barely hanging on at around 30 fps while on bridge in the open sea. I'm using TMO 1.4, PE, RSRD.

[M. Sarsfield]

My older machine has the same mother board and I think it has 1.5 GB of RAM. The video card is an older ATI card, but I can't remember the model. The game played okay, but I built a dual-core machine, which made big difference.

[FIREWALL]

If it's in the same class as a Nividia 7600 or 7800 you should be fine and able to move those sliders up and check any of the boxes. :yep:

After this upgrade I personally wouldn't spend a penny on that rig and save for new planned build.

[swdw]

The 3850's numbers are between an 8800 gts and 8800gt for the PCi-e version

[Slick Wilhelm]

The 3850's numbers are between an 8800 gts and 8800gt for the PCi-e version

Yeah, I saw that on Tom's hardware. They recommend it as the best AGP card(and probably the last) on the market. I was just hoping to find an AGP user here who is using one. We must be a dying breed, though.

Funny, but I used to build a new system about every 18 months. But once I stopped playing flight sims like Aces High and WW2OL and switched to wargames and WoW, I've discovered that my old girl still has some legs to her. But this will be the last upgrade for this system before I build a new one and farm it down to my son.

[Quillan]

That's about where I am now. I've upgraded my box as much as it can handle, and am getting ready to build a new one shortly. I've still got an AGP card (6800 Ultra) and it's still holding up, though nowhere near as well as an 8800 GT would do. I don't know much about the current ATI cards; I went from a 9800 Pro to my current one, so I have no personal experience with anything in between.

[gimpy117]

try turning off AA i know for my x1600 XT card has trouble with AA, it goes from 50fps down to 30 or 29 an even lower when looking underwater....

so yeah.....

[FIREWALL]

Hi Guys I just took a look at TigerDirect and the biggest NiVidia agp card they have is a 7300.

Lots of ATI cards but I don't know how to compare them.

You know "apples to apples" I've always been a nividia guy.

[Slick Wilhelm]

Well, I'm happy to report that with the new Radeon HD 3850, I'm getting fps in the high 50's while standing on the bridge in the open ocean, at 1680x1050 with 2x AA and 4x AF, with high textures and vertical sync enabled.

This is more than enough to get me to 2009 on my AGP rig. I wouldn't go so far as to claim that the ATI drivers are very stable for this card, as it's the first time I had to use the drivers that came on the CD-ROM(Catalyst 8.1) instead of the latest 8.3 Catalyst drivers. But if I'm getting good fps like this now, they should only get better as the drivers mature.

So if anyone is still getting by on the AGP bus and are thinking of a cheaper upgrade than building a new system....I can definitely recommend the HD 3850 for SH4.

[maerean_m]

I bought the HIS 3850 IceQ3 AGP (720 MHz/1820 MHz) that looks like this
http://www.hisdigital.com/newimages/products/HD3850_IceQ3T_PCIe_250.jpg http://www.hisdigital.com/html/product_ov.php?id=359&view=yes

The problem is that the image on the site is for the PCI-Ex version. On the site, the AGP card looks like this (which is not true).
http://www.hisdigital.com/newimages/products/HD3850_Fan_AGP_250.jpg http://www.hisdigital.com/html/product_ov.php?id=374&view=yes




Now, the drivers http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mesg/emoticons7/102.gif.
The one on the CD has the data corrupted and the setup can't run.
The one I downloaded from ATi (http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=xp/radeonx-xp) (8.2 and 8.3) tells me it doesn't recognize my card and it can't continue.
Then I downloaded the driver from HIS (http://www.hisdigital.com/html/driver.php?id=66) which are big (190mb), took forever to install (about an hour, but at least it did), and all the software that tries to read information from the card fails (3D Mark 2003, 2005, 2006, Powerstrip, Aida32). Then I started 3D Mark 2001 and after a couple of minutes it BSODed on me (when it was about to begin the Advanced Pixel Shader test).
Then I tryed a couple of games (just a few minutes are they were ok) and a couple of my old 3D applications.
One looks ok, but one doesn't:
http://i155.photobucket.com/albums/s305/maerean_m/3850%20agp/Goco3850AGP.jpg
http://i155.photobucket.com/albums/s305/maerean_m/3850%20agp/VirtualShowroom3850AGP.jpg

Also it seems it didn't install any OpenGL drivers.

Any ideas?


Never had these kind of problems with the trusted old nVidia 7800GS. The install process was just next,next,next and I was done in a minute with everything working flawlessly (with a 3300 score in default 3D Mark 2006 on a AMD Barton 3200+, ASUS A7N8X mother board and 2Gb of RAM).

[swdw]

HIS drivers suck- I think they break them by trying to tweak them. I have an HIS 3870 card and use either the ATi drivers, or the sapphire drivers.

Same for my "hi-def" video computer with a 2600 AGP. Best luck has always been with the Sapphire drivers for the AGP card. Sapphire makes most of the cards including the onese sold by ATi. I think everyone is still following the reference design laid out by ATi so the drivers should work.

http://www.sapphiretech.com/us/

[maerean_m]

Thank you for the answer.


I found this page for the drivers: http://www.sapphiretech.com/us/support/drivers.php
And I chose VGA/Sapphire HD 3800 Series/Sapphire HD 3850 512mb GDDR3 AGP and then I pressed the Archived drivers buttons that showed me a whole list of things to download. Which one should I choose?

http://i155.photobucket.com/albums/s305/maerean_m/3850%20agp/sapphiredrivers1.jpg

Should I uninstall the HIS driver (which included HDMI sound etc), or install the Sapphire driver over the existing installation of the HIS driver?

[Slick Wilhelm]

I would uninstall the HIS drivers first. You can always reinstall them if the Sapphire drivers don't work.

For whatever reason, the Catalyst 8.3 drivers from ATI or Sapphire wouldn't recognize my video card, thus ending the install program. If that happens to you, do a google search and try to find the Sapphire 8.1 Catalyst drivers. Those are working for me right now.

[Quillan]

TWhich one should I choose?

http://i155.photobucket.com/albums/s305/maerean_m/3850%20agp/sapphiredrivers1.jpg

Should I uninstall the HIS driver (which included HDMI sound etc), or install the Sapphire driver over the existing installation of the HIS driver?

Driver 1 in that list is for the 64-bit version of Windows XP. If you're running XP Pro-64 this is what you need; if you're not running that, don't touch this driver.

Driver 2 is the Catalyst Control Center version in German. What language are you using on your computer?

Driver 3 is nothing but the video card driver for both 32 and 64-bit versions of XP. If you're upgrading drivers this would be the way to go, but it sounds like you'll be starting over from scratch, so I'd suggest you go with:

Driver 4, which is only for the 32-bit version of Windows XP.

I'd see if you can find an older version of DriverCleaner, unless you want to hit www.drivercleaner.net and pay $10 for the current version. Either way, uninstall your old video card drivers, reboot into safe mode, run DriverCleaner and strip out ever remnant of your old drivers, reboot again, and install the new ones.

[maerean_m]

Thank you for your answers.

First of all, none of the Catalyst installers did recognize the card to be an ATi card.
So I forced the (8.3) Display Driver by loading the .inf file from inside Device Manager.

Then I installed the Control Center the usual way (setup.exe).

After googling for it, I found out that you could get 3D Mark to go beyond the splash screen by renaming one of its dlls (directpll.dll). This only happens on ATi cards.
The result in 3D Mark 2006 was 4900 with framerates way better then on the nVidia 7800GS OC (which scored 3300) in the 1280*1024 resolution. That's almost 50% better overall and more than 100% better for the Shader Model 3 processing speed.

In games, the results are good but not like in 3D Mark. It seems that even with the 7800GS, games tend to be CPU bound (on a Barton 3200+).

By the way, the HIS 3850 AGP ATi card is overclocked by default: 720 MHz / 1820 MHz, instead of the usual 668 MHz / 1656 MHz.
The Leadtek 7800GS was overclocked to 500 MHz / 1400 MHz instead of the default 375 MHz / 1200 MHz.

[Hartmann]

I use a new 2600 Xt and i have problems with performance in sh3

At night, in a convoy, when the ships use searchlights , i have a severe slowdown using the external camera when i look at the lights direction. :nope:

With sh4 the performance is not as good as expected , similar to my old 6600gt card.

i use 8.6 drivers with the control center :doh: perhaps something is really wrong with the drivers pack...:damn:

i´m considering buy a 7600 gt card for a few Euros and throw away this Radeon .

[kramxel]

Righ now I'm using a 8600gt from Nvidia...

I ran everything all maxed up and a resolution of 1440x900....

I've had some occasional slowdown, when I zoom in on that white smoke of explosions... it only happens randomly...

P.S: Is it just me or are these new names from nvidia and ati just too damn confusing? I guess it must be on purpouise...

[tazzharm]

Hello
well just signed up to this forum and restarted playing sh4 with uboat addon
didn't even know about add on till my wife mentioned that I havn't played sub came in awhile so here I am........:D
anyways
I read your post inregards to agp HD 3850
If I may and you don't have to lisen of coarse I had upgraded my 2002 pc with orig p4 2.0gig 2gig ddr ram and purchased a x1900ddr3 ( i think ) next one after 256
some games ran ok with low to med settings.
After using these type of forums which are great by the way I ended up finally after a few trial and errors rebuilding my pc completly.
Don't get a off the shelf computer build yourself as you stated
Do your research as much as possible unlike myself cause you'll save time and money.
anyways....
I now have the saphire HD 3850 1gig ddr3 pci e, vid card and love it
only thing about it that um maybe not too ok with is nvida might run alittle faster from different forums I read.
but for the price its a great choice all my components I picked up at Canada computers and I price chop so hopefully you will find your answers
for what its worth i play fsx allot and can run the game at 95% maxed
but I'm never satisfied always looking to tweak my system.


asus p5k
win xp home 32bit
saphire 1gig ddr3
4 gig ddr2 800mhz ram
Creative Sound Blaster X-FI Xtremegamer FATAL1TY
Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 Socket LGA775, 2.33 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB

[RickC Sniper]

I've read that the 3850 cards run very very hot.

Tazzharm and Maerean_M........can you confirm that?

I'm running an x1950 and it runs hotter than I would like. I'd like to get a 3850 but am leery about the heat issue I read about.

[FIREWALL]

Welcome Aboard Tazz :up:

[kriller2]

Yes using this card right now and I am stunned as how much life it has breathen into my good old rig which now runs Crysis in high with 15-20 fps and the new Grid Racer at everything high:sunny: the AGP still lives.

My rig :
Amd X2 5200 Oc'ed and runing the 800 mhz memory at 880 = 1.74 ghz FSB
X3850 Sapphire AGP

[tazzharm]

hey
well I havn't had any issues yet with my HD 3850 1 gig with over heating
how would I tell?
SH4 is maxed on graphics and it runs perfectly i'd like to find out how to get better graphic though...I'm never happy :smug:
If you know fsx I've played for awhile at about 90% max graphics and still card runs great.
I do have the side of my pc off so maybe that helps not sure.
however if you find out anything let me know.
I think I spent about $1250 or so on upgrades for my pc
good luck with your search
oh yea at one point I was using saphire HD 1650xt ddr4 256 in crossfire didn't like it as much as fsx and other games I didn't see a difference. so I pulled them and went with a full 1gig ddr3 3850

[FIREWALL]

The 3850's numbers are between an 8800 gts and 8800gt for the PCi-e version

Yeah, I saw that on Tom's hardware. They recommend it as the best AGP card(and probably the last) on the market. I was just hoping to find an AGP user here who is using one. We must be a dying breed, though.

Funny, but I used to build a new system about every 18 months. But once I stopped playing flight sims like Aces High and WW2OL and switched to wargames and WoW, I've discovered that my old girl still has some legs to her. But this will be the last upgrade for this system before I build a new one and farm it down to my son.

Ithink I will pickup this vid card and ring alittle more out of my rig before a new biuld. Never knew this was availble.

[darkcurrent]

Well, I'm happy to report that with the new Radeon HD 3850, I'm getting fps in the high 50's while standing on the bridge in the open ocean, at 1680x1050 with 2x AA and 4x AF, with high textures and vertical sync enabled.

This is more than enough to get me to 2009 on my AGP rig. I wouldn't go so far as to claim that the ATI drivers are very stable for this card, as it's the first time I had to use the drivers that came on the CD-ROM(Catalyst 8.1) instead of the latest 8.3 Catalyst drivers. But if I'm getting good fps like this now, they should only get better as the drivers mature.

So if anyone is still getting by on the AGP bus and are thinking of a cheaper upgrade than building a new system....I can definitely recommend the HD 3850 for SH4.

How do you get AA?

I'm using a 4870 and can't seem to get AA or AF working....


Thanks