Catalyst 3.2 2D speed problem

whytless physh · Mar 24, 2003, 12:52 PM

Hello All,

I recently upgraded my system to the Cat 3.2 drivers and had a small problem with 2D refresh speed. In short it sucked. Screen draws were painfully slow.

I'm running an 8500DV with DX9 on an Asus A7M266-D with dual MP 2400s. I uninstalled the Cat 3.0 drivers, booted into safe mode, ran driver cleaner, booted back to normal mode and spent 20 minutes installing the Cat 3.2s, Control Panel, WDM drivers and MMC 8.1. After rebooting the required 30-40 times, the 2D speed problem became most apparent.

Playing around with the situation for about 10 minutes lead to a solution that resolved the problem but I don't know why and I'm curious to find out. Simply put, I went to the SmartGART CP tab and turned FastWrites "ON". After rebooting, the 2D speed was back to normal. FastWrite was most definately NOT on under the Cat 3.0 drivers. It is also not enabled in the system BIOS. I also encountered this problem with a 7200 OEM card where I work. I didn't have the time to play around with that one a downgraded back to Cat 3.0 which fixed the problem.

Has anyone else encountered this problem? Does anyone know why enabling FastWrites would solve it? I'm not complaining about the Cat drivers because they are so much better than what came before, but I'd really like to know what's going on here.

Thanks for any advice in this matter.
-wp

riles9262 · Mar 24, 2003, 02:35 PM

that sounds like your agp was set to off, or 1x, cause fastwrites dont really make any diff...but and agp set to off will cause everything in windows to slow down.

whytless physh · Mar 25, 2003, 10:58 AM

Hey riles9262,

I am fairly certain that the AGP slot was set to 4x through the entire operation. I did not change the BIOS setting prior to updating the drivers. The fact the same problem occurred on two completely different platforms points to a commonality in the driver set, not the hardware.

Looking at magdt's post (problems with cat 3.2), I see that I am not the only one who has experienced this situation. His solution was different than mine but produced the same results. I am starting to suspect a registry setting bug. I have seen no comments about this concerning the 9000 series of Radeon cards. Might it be that during the driver install something about the registry setting goes awry when a 9x00 card is not detected? Or possibly the inclusion of a setting that should be there for the 9000 series but not for older models?

When any change is made through the ATI CP, it seems to correct the problem. I have subsequently set the FastWrite option back to off and the problem has not reoccurred. My system is, unfortunately, not geared towards troubleshoot a problem such as this. I cannot spend hours debugging and installing drivers as my box is used for work most of the day and night. Might someone here who has the capability do a quick investigation and possibly find the cause? It's relatively easy to fix but might be something others would like to know about before installing the Cat 3.2s.

Thanks you for your reply by the way.

-wp

riles9262 · Mar 25, 2003, 03:37 PM

a registry bug seems kinda odd, cause i believe that the main point of spikes driver cleaner prog is to fish the files out of the registry so you dont have to. did you own a nvid card or another vid card previously and not format your sys b4 you installed your 8500dv? leftover files from other cards cause significant problems sometimes...changing stuff in the ati cp seems easy enough as a fix, but you shouldnt be required to do that for your card to run correctly. i would have to suggest that now that your card is working correctly, not to install any more new drivers unless you see a fix in them that you require, and keep a lookout for others with your original problem. unfortunately, i dont think magdt said yet whether he got his problem fixed and how he did it...

wkw7889 · Mar 27, 2003, 02:00 AM

I have the same problem on my notebook. Using the Omega Catalyst 3.2 and Radeon Mobility. What I did was... I manually extract the driver and use device manager to manually "force" install the driver again. Then it's okay.

magdt · Mar 27, 2003, 08:27 AM

I think I'm having the same problem. my simple lowering of the hardware acceleration helped but did not solve the problem. just simple window redraws are slow. I would be interested in hearing of someone with an 8500 that has successfully used the 3.2 drivers. I've installed back to the 2.5 drivers as they seem to be the best I have encountered so far.

dipstick · Mar 27, 2003, 09:50 AM

Very weird, I've never had a problem with my 8500 and the 3.2's(although it's not a DV). If you guys want I will guide you through how I install my new drivers. First get regcleaner(with installer) from http://www.vtoy.fi/jv16/shtml/regcleaner.shtml and install it. Now follow these steps.

1. Boot into safe mode.
2. Go to add/remove and remove the drivers and control panel(do not restart at all yet, I will tell when. CLick NO when asked to restart for both unistalls)
3. Delete the ati folder in C: drive
4. Delete the ati folder in the program files directory.
5. Run regcleaner and delete the ATi entries. There should be 4 of them
6. Now you can finally restart
7. Disable you NAV's apps and install the 3.2 ATi drivers(do not restart when asked)
8. Install the control panel (now you can restart when asked)
9. That's how I do it everytime and have never had an issue.
10. Good luck

riles9262 · Mar 27, 2003, 10:14 AM

i used to do it that way, only i manually removed the ati files, aka: i didnt use regcleaner. now i use the drivercleaner and i have never had a problem...