ATI Radeon videocard problems (probably)

[Kristian2]

hello all,

not so long ago I bought SHIII, but I have had trouble with it since. When I run the game it hangs shortly after loading, I tried several drivers for my videocard, an Ati Radeon 9600XT (my hardware fulfills the recommended specs), didn't resolve it or made it worse. In the best case the game works for about 10-15 minutes (or longer depending on the mission) with the Ati drivers that come with XP (SP1).
I haven't found an answer so far on another forum and the Ubisoft helpcenter hasn't provided an answer either. My best guess is that my videocard simply doesn't work with this game. Everything else, including a non-Ubisoft game, does work without problems (except MS Train Simulator which also stalls, and is a Ubisoft game as well).
I am thinking of buying a Radeon 9800Pro, or better perhaps an nvidia card (AGP 8x).
My question is does anyone know that this videocard (Radeon 9600) is giving trouble.

And anticipating on the 'Grey Wolves' mod, after I get this game running, is a videocard with 256MB a bit overkill compared to a mere 128 MB?

Thanks,
Kristian

[danlisa]

Before I got my X800Pro I was using a 128mb 9600 (bog standard) with GW. I did initially have problems like you described but I downloaded the ATI removal tool from ATI's website. Having completely removed the ATI installation I swapped to using Omega Drivers. These are less of a system hog.

The 9600 will struggle a little in ports & around convoys but it is playable even with a little AA/AF.

The 9600's also had a issue with using the correct AGP bios setting. IIRC I turned mine down from 128 to 64, with no further problems.

FYI, I picked up my X800pro from e-bay for £80 (GB) and run with full AA/AF with no slowdowns at all.

How much system RAM do you have? Also, these crashes can be caused by on board sound hardware acceleration. Open your sound properties and turn it right down.

[gmuno]

Please post your complete rig.

SHIII ran on my late (motherboard broken) rig quite fine: AMD 3000+ @ 2.17 GHz, 1536 MB RAM, 9800Pro, DX 9.0c

[jasonsagert]

As GMUNO said, posting the specs of your rig will help with trouble shooting. The ATI 9000 family are suppose to be supported (as my game box says anyway).

Also, larger video ram doesn't = better performance. It depends on the "guts" of the card. There are some cards with 128 mb mem. that will out perform cards with 256 or even 512 mem. Do some research on the web before you buy. I hear that you can get some old agp 9800 cards for pretty cheap. And they'll run SH3 great.

Cheer,

J

[HunterICX]

:hmm:

ATI cards in my opinion are crappy, lots of problems, they fail to much for what I have been reading in the communities I have been before,

for example in BF2, after a certain patch of that game, one of the series of ATI stopped running the game or gave mayor graphic glitches (weird colors and stuff)
cant specify wich it was, but it was a card that was supported by the game (somewhere in the middle of the list). now the comunity was full of ''HELP ME'' threads about the same problem. they installed the latest drivers but it just didnt run the game. now the funny part is I have a m8 who has a Geforce FX5500 256 MB, now that Card is not on the list of supported vid card by BF2 because it misses something, but thanks to a small fix (a certain files that changes something in the BF2 graphic configuration) the game just run very good on Low/Med graphic setup.

so my story is, buy a good Geforce card, and no , a 256 MB card isnt overkill. the 256 mb cards are now very good and stable. the 512 in ohter hand is still in baby shoes and need more research. but thats the beauty of computer hardware, it never stops. I advice a good Geforce Serie 6 or 7 , those are very recomandable.

HunterICX

[Kristian2]

Thanks for all your answers.
My specs are b.t.w. P4 3GHz, Radeon 9600XT (128MB), 1G Ram.
The drivers I use that give the problems I described are the Omega drivers. The Ati Catalyst drivers don't work with this game at all and only the certified MS/Ati drivers work for around 15 minutes when I am lucky. I can't find anything wrong in my bios settings, and the videocard settings are standard. There seems to be no logic behind all this.

My last resort is buying a new videocard if I want to run those two games. I prefer to buy a used Radeon 9800 pro, but I can't take the risk with Ati this time and since nvidia also better supports Linux, I may go for the last one.
The card I may consider is a Geforce XFX VGA 7600GS 256Mb (around 120 euro). I am not sure if there is better value for money. This videocard will probably not be able to perform to the fullest with my CPU.

[HunterICX]

Thanks for all your answers.
My specs are b.t.w. P4 3GHz, Radeon 9600XT (128MB), 1G Ram.
The drivers I use that give the problems I described are the Omega drivers. The Ati Catalyst drivers don't work with this game at all and only the certified MS/Ati drivers work for around 15 minutes when I am lucky. I can't find anything wrong in my bios settings, and the videocard settings are standard. There seems to be no logic behind all this.

My last resort is buying a new videocard if I want to run those two games. I prefer to buy a used Radeon 9800 pro, but I can't take the risk with Ati this time and since nvidia also better supports Linux, I may go for the last one.
The card I may consider is a Geforce XFX VGA 7600GS 256Mb (around 120 euro). I am not sure if there is better value for money. This videocard will probably not be able to perform to the fullest with my CPU.

Well, to get ultimate performance out of the system you should ask someone that knows about it (a good friend, or someone you can trust he knows it) maybe he suggests a different Nvidia card that would run good with the other hardware you have. because its better to have a good balanced computer then a computer that has a good graphic card performance but cant go on its maximum because the CPU cannot comply with it.

[stabiz]

I ran GW (kinda ok) on a Radeon 9600 256MB, Athlon 64 3000+ and 1 giga RAM a while ago.

[Redwine]

:hmm:

ATI cards in my opinion are crappy, lots of problems, they fail to much for what I have been reading in the communities I have been before, HunterICX

Agree with you initially i bought an ATI X800 PRO, i was enforced to return it back to store, it was curved as a banano, and make non good contact... they give me another one, an X800 XT PE, it was having troubles from the first day with SH3 and Lock-On, it make lot of big texture triangles and aberrations.

I changed lot of driver versions, from ATI and Omega and no way....

To solve it i was enforced to "Under-Clock" it, and uncheck "controlled by aplication" AA and AF boxes...

It is my last ATI card.... never again. :dead:

[crazypete]

Maybe we need to look at this another way. You said it runs for 10-15 minutes then bombs. That sounds like an overheating video card to me.

I am running a 9800 SE and playing SH3, I ran across a huge convoy in a storm and suddenly all the ship graphics went away. I could still see wakes but no ships. Then it bluescreened.

I rebooted and tried again. After 5 minutes, same thing.

I smelled something, opened my computer to find my video card basically smoking.

DANG

Switched the fan and added a casefan blowing across the top of the ATI and now it hums along just fine.

So try and open your case and put a desktop fan blasting right at the video card and see if it helps.

oh no...I cant make attachments! I have a lovely graphic of a burnt out video card!

[Von Taticus]

:huh:

I've run ATI cards (all made by Saphire) for years. (7000 , 9600 9800)
The 9600 SE I had was a bit slow until the major rewrite by ATI of there Catalyst drivers.

I now run an 9800SE and have no probs at all. I run catalyst 6.6 drivers and get a smooth performance (apart from a little slow down when water blurs the periscope)

I am supprised to see ATI being critisized in this thread, I think they are fine. My next card will be an X1900 ... when the wallet allows.;)

[P_Funk]

Maybe we need to look at this another way. You said it runs for 10-15 minutes then bombs. That sounds like an overheating video card to me.

I am running a 9800 SE and playing SH3, I ran across a huge convoy in a storm and suddenly all the ship graphics went away. I could still see wakes but no ships. Then it bluescreened.

I rebooted and tried again. After 5 minutes, same thing.

I smelled something, opened my computer to find my video card basically smoking.

DANG

Switched the fan and added a casefan blowing across the top of the ATI and now it hums along just fine.

So try and open your case and put a desktop fan blasting right at the video card and see if it helps.

oh no...I cant make attachments! I have a lovely graphic of a burnt out video card!
I'll have to agree with you. I had a Radeon 9800 Pro made by Sapphire who's fan suddenly stopped working. For an upper end card its amazing that it didn't have a heat sensor or any way of telling me that my fan had cut out. So anyway it ran for a few WEEKS without cooling and then I started to have issues. Graphical glitches and bad rendering and then graphical lock ups where everything crashed. Didn't take me more than a day to raelise what had happened. So got a new fan and it worked alright. However the new problem was that the card had permanent damage. So after a few more months of okay function it finally began to act as if it was overheating again and then died. The stock ATI fan as I later learned is terrible and mine died after only a few months of operation.

I'm currently running an ATI Radeon X1600 Pro 256. It's a pretty decent card for $100 and its tiding me over until I make my new computer. Runs SH3 with GW fine.

But definately this issue sounds like an overheated card. First thing to do is to check to see if the fan is working. A little strip of paper would be able to tell you without the need to harm your fingers.

[stabiz]

Yeah, my 9600 fan stopped too, but I got beeping sounds from the motherboard warning me. I gave the fan a little push, and it started again. I had to do this once in a while.

After that I left ATI for nVidia.

[GT182]

Kristian2, if you decide to go with NVidia take a look at this one, your system will run it just fine. I just got one and it's great. No hiccups in SHIII at all and runs with everything turned up and on. Price is reasonable if you can get it from here....

https://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?name=XFX-68XT25

[Deep-Six]

Me being a PC tech, I had a problem w/ ATI card. I had a ATI X700XT PRO.

Certain games esp when the screen is black could not see anything at all.

I then decided to buy a NVIDIA 7600GS OC w/ 512megs of ram.

Now the games that I do play, do play as they should.

They are CoD2, SH3, and others.:)

Now I have to get rid of Navy Dude.:o

[Steeltrap]

Well I have a new X 1950 XTX, 512Mb GDDR4 and it works a treat.

I used to use nVidia, had no problems there either.

The cooling point was a good one, but my card has its own fan. My system has 2Gb DDR2 @ 667, so it's capable of handling it all.

I hold off buying until I can afford something mean, then I build it all at once from scratch. Latest rig is the first I've had since 2000 when I bought a P4 866 which was, believe it or not, pretty 'top end' performance at the time.

The Athlon FX-62 dual core with the graphics and RAM above is my latest version, and I'm expecting it to last for some years.

[Kristian2]

Thanks again for all your advice.
I will probably go for an Nvidia card this time (to be on the safe side). As of the nvidia card I mentioned earlier I read somewhere that a power supply of 400W was not a bad idea considering its power consumption. Well I have a 350W power supply and a P4 3GHz processor and since I bought them recently I will wait a while for another upgrade and thus have to look for a videocard that is performance wise more or less in balance with my cpu. With a relatively underperforming cpu you don't get a better overall performance, I suppose. I don't know how one determines this, but probably an nvidia card that compares with a 9800 pro or something like that I think. If I can still obtain such a card that is.
An overheating videocard was not the case as with the Omegadrivers the screen goes black within one minute or so (and then the game continues judging on the sound).

[stabiz]

I have a 350 watt power supply, and it can take care of 1 XFX 7900 GS 256MB, 1,5 gig DDR SDRAM, 2 sata disks, audigy soundcard, dvd-r rom and an AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (2,4ghz).

But I guess it will have to go when I get more RAM and a even better graphics card. (Although the 7900GS is freakin awesome, just got it, and GW runs smooth as silk in 1600x1200 with full antialiasing and anisoptric filtering)

[d@rk51d3]

I'm runing a Radeon 9600XT Platimum -256MB, and It's been working fine for me. Even with the sea floor turned on frame rates only start to drop a little in harbour.

If you do run with the Omega drivers though, make sure you COMPLETELY remove any ATI drivers first. You can't mix and match drivers, they will give you grief.

BTW, anybody got a clue as to AGP aperture settings. What exactly do they do? Is there a sweet spot?

[eolian]

I am currently running SH3 W/ GW on a ATI 9600 pro 128 mb card with 1.5GB RAM ,2.8G P4 processor with all in all no problems. During certain times like the periscope issue of being wet when you first rise it above the waves i have a frame rate slow down.
I did have SH3 commander and had a lot of crashes but i reinstalled a fresh SH3 W/ 1.4 patch and just put GW on top of it. I have completed around 10 missions with no problems at all.

[crazypete]

Mine didnt give me problems until "late in the war" either.

I guess its all the extra spotlight and flare action from the added escorts and lights on the merchantmen....etc.

Thats a lot of shading to draw.

[3Jane]

I run SHIII with GW mods through a Saphire Radeon 9800+ Pro with Omega drivers using the auto-overclocking and 1.50 Gb DDR. Apart from some drop in FPS around ports the game generaly runs fine. Others have sugested that oveheating may be a cause, my thoughts also. Depending on your budget of course I would definitely sugest trying Zalman AGP and CPU coolers. Also chipset coolers on the AGP card memory chips. http://www.zalman.co.kr/
My other specs: Asrock KV7VT4A Pro MB, Seagate Barracuda SATA HDD and AMD Sempron 3000+ cpu.

[AVGWarhawk]

Thanks again for all your advice.
I will probably go for an Nvidia card this time (to be on the safe side). As of the nvidia card I mentioned earlier I read somewhere that a power supply of 400W was not a bad idea considering its power consumption. Well I have a 350W power supply and a P4 3GHz processor and since I bought them recently I will wait a while for another upgrade and thus have to look for a videocard that is performance wise more or less in balance with my cpu. With a relatively underperforming cpu you don't get a better overall performance, I suppose. I don't know how one determines this, but probably an nvidia card that compares with a 9800 pro or something like that I think. If I can still obtain such a card that is.
An overheating videocard was not the case as with the Omegadrivers the screen goes black within one minute or so (and then the game continues judging on the sound).

I find your last sentence interesting(and then the game contiues judging on the sound). What do you mean. I know sometimes that some sounds will loop a few times and slow or stop the game. Perhaps a sound card issue or MB sound issue?


I run GW mod with AMD3200+/1 gig RAM/Nvidia 6200OC 256MB/sound provided by MB(Mboard made by Nivida)...with exception of slight choppy port performance that everyone seems to get, I have no other issues. Particle density is at 100%. I have had comments on my screenshot post that my pics are crystal clear and sharp! I have had Nvidia cards on every computer I have owned and will never change from Nvidia. Just a good card. Clue us in on that last comment of yours concerning sound...possibly your issue????

[Kristian2]

I have a soundblaster Live soundcard (onboard sound disabled of course).
What happens is: the game stalls, then the screen goes black, after a short while the sound and the game continues as it were as I am able to fire a torpedo e.g. and hear other sounds as well.
This happened on most occassions, perhaps on all, but this is so annoying that I immediately kill the game. It is rather puzzling, and Ubisoft still hasn't taken any trouble to answer my question. It is perhaps worth the gamble to buy a new videocard (120 euro costs for a 20 euro game, anyway it is probably worth it).

[Castout]

I run SHIII on lower specs than you: Radeon 9600Xt 128Mb, 512Mb RAM, 2.8GHz PIV.
Make sure to patch SHIII to its most current version 1.4.

I had crashes when first palying SHIII but it went away. Here's what i did
For me disable the music. Don't add anything to the gramaphone folder. It will crash your campaign. And once it crash once it WILL crash again for sure. DELETE that campaign and start new one and don't repeat that mistake(adding files to gramaphone folders). Better not to even play the original gramaphone music or rename that original music file so it won't get loaded. It solves my problem permanently. Never had a crash since! except when i add some music files to the gramaphone folder.

Good luck. remember you're running SHIII with twice the RAM that i do.

[AVGWarhawk]

I'm not a soundblaster fan. I have run into issue with that card concerning other games. Try this, disable the soundblaster card and let the Motherboard run the sound or just disable the soundblaster and see if the issue goes away. If so, then I would suspect the sound card is problem. Perhaps reduce the hardward exceleration on the sound card if you can

[NipplesTheCat]

Run DXdiag and turn off hardware acceleration on your soundcard. Causes a lot of crashes.

[AVGWarhawk]

Run DXdiag and turn off hardware acceleration on your soundcard. Causes a lot of crashes.


I see Nipples seconds my opinion on the sound card. These do cause issue. Now if Nipples would only tell me the story behind his knick name Nipplesthecat. Thank God his knick name is not ILIKESHEEP. That is self explanatory:rotfl:

[NipplesTheCat]

Oops I didnt see that you had already posted that. Yes I second that.

P.S. We all have our secrets.

[Der Eisen-Wal]

i run SH3 on a HP Laptop 3.0Ghz P4, 1.2G RAM, and a ATI Mobility 9000 card 128mb shared. it works fine, i tuned it so that it focussed on performance rather than graphics but it plays and i get great fun out of it. Your vid card is probably burned out or something is wrong with it. I doubt its because of the model of videocard since i can run my game on such a ****ty card

[Redwine]

I have a soundblaster Live soundcard (onboard sound disabled of course).
What happens is: the game stalls, then the screen goes black, after a short while the sound and the game continues as it were as I am able to fire a torpedo e.g. and hear other sounds as well.
This happened on most occassions, perhaps on all, but this is so annoying that I immediately kill the game. It is rather puzzling, and Ubisoft still hasn't taken any trouble to answer my question. It is perhaps worth the gamble to buy a new videocard (120 euro costs for a 20 euro game, anyway it is probably worth it).

I was having troubles with that sound card, initially i use the game with my onboard sound card, but it take lot of CPU resources :-?, then i change to my old SB Live Gamer/Player, it rise up the FPS, but has lot of sound bugs and extrenge behaviours. :dead:

I was enforced to buy a X-Fi. :-?