Radeon 7500 opengl

Tupsu

I sent this kind of email to omegadrive. I hope I get replies from omega and others.

I've radeon 7500 built by ati, win98se and athlon xp 1.4ghz. I mostly
play HL:cs with opengl. When I purchased the card I struggled with the drivers
for a while. None of the official ones could last over 3 or 4 hours of straight
opengl cs gaming. After that the machine booted or the game locked up. Then
the Ati released an opengl optimized beta driver 9013(http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/winme/winmeradeon4139013sp.html).
So far no problems with opengl and no crashing in win98se. In glXS benchmark
it gave better results than any of the previous drivers and any driver after
that. With 640x480 res I got around 6000points while other drivers gave
only maximum of 5500 or crashed while running the glxs benchmark. Your drivers
being based on other ati drivers are not working in opengl with me at all
or not fast enough. Only problem with that 9013 driver is the D3D wich is
at least in GTA3 giving some bizarre lag. The lag may be in other D3D games
too. I was hoping you as the radeon guru and knowing what of the files in
the driver are for opengl, you could make an omegadriver with 9013 opengl
files and configs. Plz.

I'll see if I can post this to driverheaven forums too and see what people
say. Only radeon 7500 user's message that I've seen in the forums complaining
the drivers said he was using some really old ati driver since it was the
only driver working for him. I guess all the other win98 rad7500 users are
also using some very old driver or not playing much opengl games and living
with the crashes and lock ups as the latest drivers are for 8500.

Risky

Well this is not entirely true. I have a Radeon 64 DDR and i am still updating the drivers and even seeing differences in quality and performance. Perhaps the problems you are encountering in HL:CS are of a different nature? Have you applied the HL patches for ATI cards? My good old 64 DDR with the 9044's runs CS (or any other game in OGL) just fine.

Mystik

Do not install the previous ATi OpenGL patches for the current version of CS..

Unless you would like more problems.

Have you tried reinstalling Half-Life & CS? (assuming you have MOD version)..
Every now and then, Half-Life seems to hiccup and a reinstall seems to fix it nicely..
It'll only take a few minutes, and you can backup your CS directory and just move it
back in when you reinstall HL..

Or if you want to feel more safe, just uninstall everything (CS included) and reinstall
from scratch (save any alias files you may have created yourself, or your autoexec.cfg
and whatnot)..

Tupsu

The ati HL fix is for the older version as Mystik said. And the problem isnt just cs related. With official drivers the system is unstable, any game wont last more than a few hours before crash, lockup, or system boot. In desktop I'm also seeing black blocks, sort of trails remaining when different windows' are enlarged and collapsed to an icon to the bar. Does that happen to any of you? Everything except D3D(laggy and slower than with official drivers) works fine with this beta driver I mentioned earlier, my windows uptime is even now about a week.

Mystik

What do you mean, black blocks? Can you take a screenshot of it?

Does it look like just a black square where an Icon should be? I've had that problem
every now and then, but it only involved a long uptime combined with heavy usage
of applications.. Usually when that happens, I save everything I'm doing and do a quick
reboot to fix it.. Win9x doesn't like being up for a very long time.. it's very poor in
memory management and requires a reboot to free up all the available resources (mem
cleaners don't work -- they don't clear the necessary resources, which are GDI and
USER resource, only RAM itself)..

try rebooting into Safe Mode, uninstall your current drivers (wipe your windows of
any ATi related things, if you don't know the steps to take, just ask and i'll post it up),
and reinstall the drivers..

Risky

Well i am back to to the 9031's. I had a completely different problem. I was getting exits to desktop both with CS ( i am playing the PodBots2.5 now) and some very strange exits with Warcraft3. Now everything is back to normal and my win98 are stable again. Well i am getting some crashes with Netscape 7.0 and some sites that use Java applets. I am gonna give the 9050's a try now and let you know.

Risky

Well i installed the 9050's(with a bit of inf tweaking), then the Control Panel and everything seems to be working fine, at least with CS. I am gonna try pushing the War3 engine and see if the new drivers can handle it. At least random lockups and desktop exits that appeared with the 9044's are gone.

Mystik

I didn't get the 9044's.. I didn't install them when they came out (for some reason,
i didn't trust them).. i went from the 9043's to the 9050's.. and everything is still
going smooth for me..

Maybe the 9044's were cursed? =)