Fuzzless

I recently purchased a Sapphire Radeon 9100 Atlantis 128MB DDR to upgrade from a ATi Radeon 7200 64MB SDRAM. The new card doubled 3DMark benchmark scores and the graphics definitely appear sharper. However, the new card is not useable with most of our current and pre-purchase demo games!

Despite using Driver Cleaner, updating VIA drivers and to latest Catalyst driver and Control Panel (inc. Omegadrive's Cat drivers based on 3.4) I still have the following problems:

Older games - CMR2 wont load, failing while it tries to restore default settings having detected the new card; Max Payne, Cataclysm, Superbike 2000, Deus Ex etc. all stutter in action scenes to the point of unplayability or totally freeze!!!

Newer games and Demos - Freelancer, Hitman 2 games stutter as does Colin MacRae 3, Battlefield 1942 and other demos. TOCA Race Driver has almost completely transparent cars bar the windscreen and headlight glasses and wheelarch liners!?*?! It stutters when you hit the brakes! In this latter case Codemasters confirm they hadn't tested this specific card but other Radeons worked fine and since the 8500 on which the 9100 is based also worked they were amazed it didn't run correctly.

All but Freelancer, and CMR3 were playable and running smoothly on the older 7200 with its meagre 64MB SDRAM, albeit with poorer fps and visual quality. Also the 7200 back in it ran with the later era Directx9.0a and Catalyst drivers so what is wrong with the 9100? Have tried Cat 3.1, 3.2, 3.4 7.88 drivers; lower graphic settings in games; reloading games to establish fresh links with the new card, but to no avail.

Oddly, TOCA2 game and Quakelll and UT2003 demos we have, work well!!!?!!!

Is this still all a driver problem?
Or could the PSU not be man enough for all the kit and cause the symptom?
Or is the DDR memory on the card trying to work the PC133 system RAM faster than it is capable?

HHEEELLLPPP!!

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Soltek SL-75KAV-X mobo Rev. Q11 (in ATX case+300W PSU)
AMD Athlon XP1600
512MB RAM PC133
Sapph.. 9100 128MBDDR Cat. 3.5 7.90 driver
Audigy + Inspire 5400 5.1 spkrs
IBM Deskstar 40GB HDD, Samsung CDROM, LiteOn CD-R, Creative DVD
etc.

Win98 SE all updates
Directx9.0a
Via chipset drivers Hyperion 4.48

UberLord

Try turning hardware acceleration down one notch or a clean re-install of the OS

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Gentoo Linux - Developer (baselayout)
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"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
Stephen Roberts