anyone who palys wolfenstein ET, if you have a different driver that works for you... dont get 4.1. I lost 3-7fps in wolf ET and i just read on a website that there has been known issues with 4.1 and wolf ET for performance losses. Well atleast i know I can use all the newer cat drivers from 3.10 and up and 3.5 and down.

Thanks Black for the RtCW:ET warning!

In addition, thanks to all the guys who looked into the BIOS versions and flashes - very informative and conclusive: there are BIOS discrepancies btw. what should be identical cards...not good.

I've talked to electrical engineering students at Purdue and Stanford (postgraduate) on the subject and they can't come to definite fixes without a soldering iron...

If ATI was a horse in the Grand National- it would have lead the race after over coming the fav (NVidia) only for it to stop with the finishing line in sight for a s**t!!!!
Please will these cards ever be made to work 100%- I think not now. Surely the next gen of ATI cards will be arriving soon and these are still not upto to scratch and may even be ignored at dome point. My advice to those with a way to return cards that are just not working- get rid of them for something else which will mean an NVidia card at present and change brands too if you feel you have too.
Regards
Twilight

Well I've just been playing Call of Duty with the Cat 3.8 driver for about 3 hours straight, and it didn't crash once.
That's amazing as it's crashed like 1000 times on 3.8 before. Thats a fix in 3.10 which also plays CoD ok but crashes my system all over the place.
Try the sound thing I mentioned a few posts back and make sure APG write in smartgart is off.
I'll see what happenes when I get Halflife 2 which is also DX9 based. X fingers.
BTW my PCChips 810 series MBoard is probably the cheapest and nastiest MBoard on the market, it won't even take DDR ram so if I can get it to work on my crap system running 3.8 then there is hope for everyone.

Hi Bob,

Did you know about the Call of Duty patch for ATI cards 9500 and up using the 3.8 driver? It in the Feb PC User mag cover disks, number 2 disk I think.

I hope that might help.

Cheers Marc

Okay I have been looking around for about 3 weeks for a solution to my radeon 9600XT freezing problem. i FINALLY SOLVED IT, but first let me tell you what was wrong. Almost every game i played would crash HARD after a few seconds into it. Its the kind of crash where everything just stops, no blue screen, no restart, just the frozen image on the screen and maybe a loop of the last sound played. This was extremely annoying as i had no clues to what the problem was (bsods are my favorite to fix because they usually tell u what is wrong ie what driver) Dad of defeat and counterstrike were unplayable and games like need for speed underground (by EA) and Halo were playable for a minute or so before crashing. It would also crash during activity in windows XP. System specs are at the bottom. This is what i did:

-Updated all drivers
-Bought better power supply. i bought an Antec Smart Power 400W. (this did not solve the freezing problems in Need for speed:underground or Halo, but the half-life games became magically stable for some reason. I dont really know why, it doesnt make much sense looking back on it.)
-Messed and experimented with all the Bios options i knew about. also tried underclocking my CPU by 500 mhz. helped with heat but still not the freezing.
-I thought my processor was overheating with the stock heatsink (running 60c peak and 50c idle) so i put on a thermaltake volcano 10+ and cut out the fan grils, a top blowhole, and a side hole over the cpu fan. (this dropped my temps by 10c by the way) The heat drop did nothing for the freezing though.
-updated to catalyst 4.1s, did nothing

This is what finished it for me: i read on the site for omega drivers that fastwrite should be enabled on the 9600 cards, so i looked into it. I tried to enable it from smartgart on the ATI control panel, but it was greyed and would not let me turn it on. I found an option called "Fastwrite controller support" or something like that and set it to "enabled". i could then turn on fastwrite in the control panel.

Now everything is running completely stable with hardware acceleration to full, AGP 8x, video memory aperture 128, fastwrite on, VPU recover off, and cat 4.1 drivers. I hope this works for you guys, im glad i can finally get the most out of this 180 dollar investment.

specs:
AMD Barton 2800+ 333mhz fsb
ATI Radeon 9600XT 128mb
Asus A7V8X-X mobo
Sound Blaster Audigy LS
everything else is pretty irrelevant

No have't seen that yet. Is it a true CoD patch or just a driver update to Cat 3.10.
There is a so called patch at Pcgameworld which they say is -
"This patch from ATI is for Radeon 9500 or greater series video cards with the Catalyst 3.8 or later drivers.
System hang or VPU recover error problems after running the game have been fixed."
But its just an update to Cat 3.10 driver which yes fixes the crashing problen of CoD but it crashes my windows XP all over the place"
But will check it out thanks.

Wow! Is this problem happening on all 9600series cards or just the third-party built ones? I had an ATi 9600pro that produced artifacts in UT2003 and BF1942 at stock speeds but exchanged it for the one I currently use.

I'm using cat 3.8, and have used a few others, and the only time my screen freezes and the pc locks-up is when I benchmark and over-clock the core too high. Have those who have the lock-up issues tried running their pcs with the side panel off and the case seated so the card is vertical? How many watts is your psu? I wouldn't use this card on anything less than a 300 watter for an ATX rig. This sounds like a power or a heat issue to me or it could simply be a case of bad craftsmanship.

Here is a link to add more power to your 9600pro (it may help) http://unoid.net/9600pro/power.html

my specs:
ATi 9600pro @470/321 | nForce2 ultra 400 | 420w Tt purepower

Here is where you can get Driver Cleaner, a must-have program that will make waste of your old video and sound drivers: http://www.3dchipset.com/utilities/index.php

I suggest printing the instructions and following them as described if you choose to use this program. I even go a step further and run RegScrub while in safe-mode to clean the rest of the crap left behind. Hope this helps :o)

You all may want to try setting your AGP voltage to 1.55v if you're using the auto selection. I can't think of anything else. Good luck people!

sQUiRLy
member of OC3DMark Team
member of the 3DMark'03 AMD/Radeon9600series 4k club

I've had the same problems as everyone else, freezes, reboots and crashes. I have tried so many things: setting agp to 4x, turning fast write off, messing with the agp voltage, different catalyst drivers, different via drivers, even so far as to reinstall windows. Some of those things helped make my system more stable, but I still couldn't play games. today I was looking at this thread: http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/6438/?o=40 T hand's post. I did what he said, I changed my CAS from 3 to 2 in the bios and all my problems went away. And guess what? I'm running at 8x, fast write, full acceleration and all that. All my problems completely and absolutly gone by changing one stupid setting! After 2 weeks of dealing with this card I am so happy to have it working. So give this a try!

My system setup:
Asus a7v600
AMD 2100+
512mb Micron ram from crucial
120gb seagate HDD
Sapphire radeon 9600 pro 256 Atlantis
Windows XP sp1
catalyst drivers 4.1
via hyperion 4 in 1 drivers(whatever version they had a week ago)
400w power supply

Just one F***ING setting!

Hi Bob mate,

I'am too sure because I have a demo of CoD and it quite well but noticed the patch two days ago. The file it points to is, cod_ati.exe. I don't want to run it on my net pc( Now every thing right now!!!! touch wood) and like said earler my s**t test unit is preforming like a two dollar H***.

Cheers Marc

PS. Don't pretended to feed your kids to the crocs. Crikey!!

Thanks Marc I will check that out. Thats a different file name but have a funny feeling its the same. Found the mag today but didn't have any cash so will get It tomorrow.
At the moment I don't realy have any problems, i'm running CoD with game graphic settings up high and my system is stable with Cat 3.8.
Can not turn fast write on or it will crash and i'm running at 2x agp, board only supports 4x, and sound acelleration is off but I put that down to my crapy PCchips Mboard.
Thats not to say i'm a happy 9600 pro camper again because really those problems shouldn't have happened in the first place.
I would like to know how may ati radeon series gcards have been returned to stores by your average computer user because they thought it was defective, and realy they are, well the drivers are anyway.
Not good for business ATI.

P.S Babies, Chooks - not much difference realy, both taste the same.

Hi Bob.

Just a quick word Bob, I don't think any of the ati powered 9600's or the pro's video cards supported 2X AGP, They olny support 4 & 8 X capible cards. sorry for my spelling. Does your motherboard support 8X AGP or AGP 3.0? I'am not sure.

marc

"Gees Crikey!!!!! I just lost the Ozzie of the year" Crikey!!!

Yep 9600 pro supports 2X, not much difference between the pro and the XT except clock speed.
My mboard only supports 4X and DX8 based games run fine on 4X it only seems to be DX9 based stuff that crashes if you push the settings up.
DX8 games like RTCW - ET and Black Hawk Down run realy well with agp write on an every thing pushed up to the max.
I have noticed that CoD which is DX9 based heats up the card more than DX8 stuff. Maybe its working it harder and producing more heat.
I will get another fan for it and a bigger psu, but thats about all I can do.

has anyone seen a performance increase going from the hyperion 4.49 drivers to the 4.51 drivers? I want to upgrade them but im scared since the horror of the 4.50 driver. Are the 4.51 drivers ok?
also if i do decide to upgrade driver, should i reinstall my display drivers after?

I solved my Club3D 9600 256MB crashing problem by installing cat 3.10 only drivers file (7,33 MB) without control panel etc. as someone recommended above. Now everything runs normally. Of course such a solution is not itself normal, but it helps.
I'm quite disappointed with ATI's support as problems with these cards is really widespread.

I wish that I had read these "60 some odd" pages before I bought my PowerColor 9600 Pro w/ 256 MB. I would have stayed in the NVidia world. Anyway, I believe I got a clue as to the problem with this card/drivers. I submitted a trouble report to ATI basically stating that this problem is obviously big, what with all of the postings on this and other forums. I am not a big PC gamer so my situation is different in that I'm not gaming when problems occur. I run dual boot XP/2000, with the Win2000 side running DX8.1 and XP using the DX9.0. XP is my default boot O/S and after 3 months of running the ATI card, I started getting massive amounts of video corruption/.artifacts on the screen. A reboot might, or might not, fix it temporarily. So instead of trying to backtrack on something I may have installed, I downloaded a newer video driver set from ATI. This pretty much broke it permanently. This corruption happens when your in the O/S, the BIOS, and in DOS modes. Yesterday, I booted to Win2000 after several months of not, and low and behold, as soon as the video drivers were loaded, the display went back to normal, uncorrupted, 0 artifact. Eureka!!! I got to thinking that it was the driver, but the driver settings (AGP 8x, Fast-write) were all the same as XP when it died. Which brings me to the issue. In 2000, I decided to test two things, DirectX 8.1 and the new driver. Because ATI says to load DX9 before the driver, that is what I did. Halfway through the install of DX9b files (not the copying, but the replacing), the video went South just like the XP had. I am not sure if DX9b could change any setting on the card that would carry over to outside the O/S, but that is exactly what it appears to have done. The logic I am using is that as long as the XP drivers had some control over the card, which was almost always, the problem occured. As soon as the 2000 drivers had control, the card worked fine, in all modes, in BIOS, in DOS modes, etc. As soon as I loaded XP, the problem started again.
Any thoughts?

Hi Mark
I have a Gigabye 9600 Pro that appears to be almost trouble free- I only gets problems with DX9 or since I installed DX9 a few weeks back. My OS is Win 98SE so maybe there is something in this any way. XP if im right had a lot of old DOS stuff removed- wonder what else was taken out too- perhaps there were some legacy elements that older OS had that DX 9 might still need? So the answer is for a DX9 patch to address this perhaps or, XP patch or both. I'm sticking with 98SE till its not supported anymore.
Regards
Twilight
My mouse freeze problem is fixed by unplugging and plugging back the mouse. Everything is fine then!

Hi!

Club 3D Radeon 9600 Pro and MSI KT4V works fine together.
Club 3D Radeon 9600 Pro and Chaintech 7VJL Deluxe does not.

After trying just about everything showed here like bios, system and register settings, several ati and omega-drivers, four times WinXP installation etc., I finally changed my motherboard and now everything have been working without a single problem about two weeks. For example games like Halo, AOM (win32Cursor=0), HomeWorld 2, Max Payne 2 and Wolfenstein works fine. 8xAGP & fastwrite on.

I had a Chaintech 7VJL Deluxe motherboard with VIA KT 400 chipset and with that board I had nothing but troubles.

Now I have a MSI KT4V motherboard, which is also with VIA KT 400 chipset and as said earlier everything works fine. WinXPPro SP1 + updates, DirectX9.0b, wxp-w2k-catalyst-7-962-031202m1-012924c. I used all existing parts I had on the "older" board (cpu, memory, drives and the Club 3D Radeon 9600 Pro (128MB)).

I also used to have some problems with Radeon 8500 with that chaintech mainboard (actually it was the reason I bought 9600 Pro) and Soltek SL-75DRV mainboard as well. Don't know if it works with 9600 Pro, haven't tried, it works fine nVidia card, which I'am going to put on the chaintech board.

Does somebody else knows other motherboards, which works with Radeon 9600 Pro or XT?